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Start by pressing the button below! In novel after novel, and story after story, Charles de Lint has b In novel after novel, and story after story, Charles de Lint has brought an entire imaginary North American city to vivid life. Newford: where magic lights dark streets; where myths walk clothed in modern shapes; where humans and older beings must work to keep the whole world turning. He has peopled this city with extraordinary charac-ters—people Iike Joseph Crazy Dog, also known as Bones, the trickster who walks in two worlds at once; Sophie, born with magic in the blood, whose boyfriend dwells in the otherworld of dreams; Angel, who runs a center for street people and lives up to her name; Geordie.
At the center of these entwined lives stands a young artist named Jilly Coppercorn. And that past is coming to claim her now, threatening all she loves. Just a broken child. But life has just forced Jilly to stop. His evocative novels, inducting Moonheart, Memory and Dream, and Forests of the Heart, have earned him a devoted following and critical acclaim as a master of contemporary magical fiction in the manner of storytellers like John Crowley, Jonathan Carroll, Alice Hoffman, Ray Bradbury, and Isabel Allende.
It becomes folk song, the stuff of urban myth. His work defies easy categorization De Lint is a romantic, a believer in human potential, and his fiction is populated not only with creatures of myth, but with artists and social workers, musicians and runaways, all creating intentional communities based on hope and dreams and mutual belief in the magic of the world around us.
To read de Lint is to fall under the spell of a master storyteller, to be reminded of the greatness of life, of the beauty and majesty lurking in shadows and empty doorways. Jilly goes through enough already with what happens to her in this novel.
For those readers who continue to write and ask for musical references, inspiration was obviously well served by Holly Cole and Fred Eaglesmith, as noted above. But I was also charmed and swayed by any number of other albums over the year and a half it took to write this book. I was all over the place. The above only scratches the surface, but I hope it will point my fel-low music junkies to some of the pleasure I received from those artists.
If any of you are on the Internet, come visit my home page at www. Some sixth sense, prickling the hairs at the nape of my neck, I guess. I see the headlights. They fill my world and I feel like a deer, trapped in their glare. There seems to be time to do anything and everything, and yet no time at all.
I wait for my life to flash before my eyes, but all I get is those headlights bearing down on me. A rush of wind in my ears.
And then the impact. Once upon a time there was a little girl who wished she could be any-where else in all the wide world except for where she was. Or more preferably still, she wished she could find some way to cross over into whatever worlds might lie beyond this one, those wonderful worlds that she read about in stories. She would tap at the back of closets and always look very carefully down rabbit holes. She would rub every old lamp that she came across and wish on any and everything And when I did, for a long time I thought they were only this excess of imagi-nation that I carry around inside me, that somehow it was leaking out of me into the world.
A strange and wonderful world where the implausi-ble becomes not only possible, but probable. At a flea market, an old black teapot turns into a badger and scurries away. Late at night, a lost boy sits on the windowsill of the second-floor nursery in the apartment beside the Chinese grocery down the street from my studio, a tiny spark of light dancing about his shoulders as he peers in through the leaded panes. Later still, I hear the muted sound of hooves on the pavement and look out to see the dreadlocked gnome that Christy calls Long, his gnarled lit-tle fingers playing with a string of elf-knots that can call up the wind as he rides his pig Brigwin to the goblin market.
Oh, and the gargoyles The three wishes and the genies in bottles, seven-league boots, invisible cloaks and all. They stay in the stories, while out here in the wide world we have to muddle through as best we can on our own. My eyelids are sticky, encrusted with dream sand, and nothing has a defined edge to it. Col-ors are muted and my ears are blocked. I feel dislocated from the rest of my body. An IV drip in my arm. I realize I must be in a hospital. Why would I be in a hospital? I hear a small pathetic whimper and realize that I made that sound.
It draws a huge face into my line of vision, features swimming. Slowly the face becomes normal-sized, though still blurry. My ears pop at the sound of her voice. My hearing clears.
A dream I had. Then I remember the dream. Not even that troubles me. I finally found a way into your dreamlands. She visits the city of Mabon in her dreams and has a whole other, really interesting life there.
What, exactly, none of us really knows. In the hospital. Down and down and down The doctor had said that when she came out of the coma, she would probably fall into a second period of unconsciousness, but it would be more like sleep. Now all they had to worry about was the possibility of paralysis when she came around again. The call Sophie had gotten three nights ago had been her worst night-mare come true.
Sophie had often joked that Jilly must have a guardian angel look-ing out for her. Always lively and vibrant, Jilly was almost unrecognizable at the moment. Her left arm and right leg were encased in plas-ter casts.
Her torso was wrapped with bandages because of the ribs that had been cracked. Tubes from her nostrils tied her to an oxygen unit in the wall. More tubes were plugged into her body, running from an IV pole that held plastic bags of fluids. Wires connected her to a bank of machines that were gathered near the bed like a crowd of curious onlook-ers, their conversation conducted in lights and beeps and monitor lines. Her heartbeat was displayed by three waveforms undulating on a screen.
Being in here made Sophie nervous. But Sophie also had a unique problem in that mechanical and electrical devices sometimes developed odd symptoms around her. Digital watches could simply flash a random time while ordinary wristwatches ran backward. Something fanciful, rather than gloomy. You know, like our own secret code. They ended up calling it Jinx, because while it was a friendly sounding word, it still warned of its potential for disaster. Except for the call button. Had she screwed that up as well?
Was the nurse now on his way to some room at the other end of the intensive care unit? She was about to try again when the nurse came hurrying into the room.
Daniel was as handsome as a soap opera doctor, tall, dark-haired, ready smile, gentle eyes. If you had to be sick, you might as well have a dreamboat for a nurse. Sophie eased his obvi-ous concern by explaining what had happened. Sophie had to smile. With Jilly, how could you even tell?
But she nodded. Sophie looked back at Jilly. But it was still heartbreak-ing to see the damage that had been done to her, to know how much work lay ahead before Jilly might be her old self once again.
The two of them could have been sisters. They were of similar height, with the same slender build, though Sophie was a little bustier. Though the three of them were unrelated by blood, they were sisters all the same. In the heart, where it mattered. Oth-ers had come to join their tribe—and they had become close and greatly loved, to be sure—but the three of them were its root, the core from which all their other relationships blossomed.
Her own body felt lighter with the weight that had been taken from it and she was more than a little giddy herself. Even the phone was behaving for her, allowing her to talk to Wendy instead of try-ing to connect her to someone in Japan or Germany.
I was so worried. She fed another quarter into the phone and dialed the next number on her list. Be nice to me, phone, she thought.