Tag Archives: urban fantasy

Recent Reading: Wolves, Wives, Knives, Curses, A Hospital, and a Henchgirl

The works read but yet to be reviewed are piling up, so here’s a new roundup to clear away part of the deluge. The Mere Wife by Maria Dahvana Headley is a retelling of Beowulf from the monster’s point of … Continue reading

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Jane Lindskold’s Legends Walking

Jane Lindskold has followed up Changer with Legends Walking, which opens a few weeks after Changer closes. The same characters appear, many in expanded roles, new athanor characters participate, and the story takes on added complexity as several plot lines … Continue reading

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Jane Lindskold’s Changer

Urban fanstasy is a subgenre with as many sets of criteria as there are practitioners. Ranging from the Celto-Amerindian universe of Charles de Lint’s urban Canada and Neil Gaiman’s eclectic universe of the Dreaming, with even hybrids such as Mark … Continue reading

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Orson Scott Card’s Magic Street

In his previous novels, Orson Scott Card seems to have dealt with either the (far) future or the (mythic) past. Magic Street is set squarely in the here-and-now — sort of. Baldwin Hills is a black, middle-class neighborhood in Los … Continue reading

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Jane Lindskold’s Child of a Rainless Year

Jane Lindskold is one of the more adventurous authors working in the mode of speculative fiction. From her transparent contributions to Roger Zelazny’s last two books through the contemporary urban fantasy of the athanor novels through the more-or-less “classic” fantasy … Continue reading

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Charles de Lint’s The Hour Before Dawn and Two Other Stories from Newford

This volume was my first encounter with Charles de Lint’s Newford. Strangely enough, these works, particularly the title story, remind me very strongly of some of Jonathan Lethem’s stories, and I couldn’t begin to say why. De Lint’s stories are … Continue reading

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Charles de Lint’s Dreams Underfoot

Charles de Lint’s Dreams Underfoot is another collection of Newford stories, rather different in feel than those in The Ivory and the Horn. While that collection leaned more toward the “ghost stories” category, this one is much more inclined toward … Continue reading

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Mike Carey and Glenn Fabry’s Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere

Over a decade after the original televised mini-series and the novel it spawned, Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere has found new life in comic form — but not scripted by Gaiman himself. That honor has gone to Mike Carey, writer for the … Continue reading

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China Miéville’s Kraken

Don’t let the tentacles fool you — yes, China Miéville’s Kraken takes as its starting point a tentacular god of the deep reminiscent of the stories of H. P. Lovecraft, but then Miéville adds to it the baroque psychogeographies of … Continue reading

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Charles de Lint’s Moonheart

Moonheart may very well be the first novel by Charles de Lint that I ever read. I can’t really say for sure — it’s been awhile. It certainly is one that I reread periodically, a fixture on my “reread often” … Continue reading

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