Ray Bradbury presents a surreal conspiracy based on a modern (too modern) anxiety: crowds!
Tag: urban fantasy
Weird #27: “Smoke Ghost” by Fritz Leiber (1941)
Fritz Leiber's story about the ghosts of the modern city.
The Goddess in Him
Kurghan, a time-traveling Scythian blacksmith with a jewellery business in Montreal's Plateau neighbourhood, notices that his son Altai is losing the culture of his people. Kughan longs for nothing less than to feel the wind in his hair again and to ride his horse on a leopard hunt. He wants the same for his son. …
Underworld as Otherworld: Combined and Uneven Development in Charles de Lint’s Urban Fantasy Fiction
While a text asking you to believe in fairies and spirits might seem flaky, seeing as this gives us no solid program to reclaim the city, such faith does awaken the desire to see the postmodern, uneven city restored from its ruins
World Fantasy Convention 2015, Part II: My interview with Charles de Lint
Last week I talked about Guy Gavriel Kay reading from his upcoming historical fantasy Children of the Earth and Sky at the World Fantasy Convention 2015 at Saratoga Springs, NY. This week, I continue my account of the weekend's events and provide a paraphrase of my interview with Charles de Lint. First, allow me to talk …
Continue reading World Fantasy Convention 2015, Part II: My interview with Charles de Lint
Sleepless Knights by Mark H. Williams
At the beginning of another MythCon, this one in Colorado Springs--where I am now, giving a presentation--it is fitting to review the book of the first MythConer with whom I ever struck up a conversation. This is one of the only cases where I knew the author before I knew he was an author. I found him waiting …
Forests of the Heart by Charles de Lint
Does magic exist in the contemporary world? Charles de Lint's mythic fiction brings supernatural beings into the context of the everyday and Forests of the Heart explores the contact between ordinary people and what he calls Mystery. Bettina and Adelita are sisters, both partly Mexican, partly Indios, and raised by their grandmother to see la époco del …
Part I: A Multicultural Utopia: Historicizing New Fantasy in Charles de Lint’s Moonheart
The following is the first part of a presentation I gave for this year's MA colloquium. I have included the accompanying PowerPoint file as well. Historicizing Moonheart Presentation A Multicultural Utopia: Historicizing New Fantasy in Charles de Lint's Moonheart “Utopia would seem to offer the spectacle of one of those rare phenomena whose concept is …
Greenmantle by Charles de Lint
What happens when you combine Robert Graves's The White Goddess with Martin Scorsese's mafia flick Goodfellas? I'm not sure, but it wouldn't be far from Charles de Lint's 1988 'mythic fiction' novel Greenmantle. Called the father of urban fantasy, Charles de Lint is the author of dozens of novels that combine fantasy with mainstream fiction. …
Folklore and Graffiti: A (Potential) Study of Spatial Tactics and Urban Fantasy (Part II)
When we left off last week, I was trying to prove that graffiti interrupts the rational order of the city, as a spatial tactic, and therefore can be compared to urban fantasy, inasmuch as it too subverts conventional "consensus reality." I quoted Bramley Dapple in Charles de Lint's short story “Uncle Dobbin's Parrot Fair,” who says, …
Matthew Rettino 