Jin at Bookworm Ninja explains the 5 reasons you should read Charles de Lint right now.

I have never in my life wanted a city to exist as much as I have longed for Charles de Lint’s fictional Newford. I fell in love with Newford the first time I picked up “Dreams Underfoot”, and that love has lasted in full glorious fashion for nearly 20 years now. It’s a picture perfect city with a dark side that only makes me crave it more. From a tree that lives on a college campus and grows on stories, to a rust filled ghetto full of gamine shadows and heroes, Newford is everywhere I have ever wanted to go, and my heart will be broken for years that it doesn’t exist.  de Lint writes in such a way that I feel like I not only know that city, but the characters that live there. He writes it real enough that you can almost hear it breathe.

You know you want to. I want to. That kid you went to high school with that wore the Harry Potter robes to class wanted to.  Charles de Lint not only makes you want to believe in magic, but weaves it into his urban fantasy in such realistic ways that I am often left checking the corner of my vision for the unexplainable.  What I like best about his books is that while the magic is indeed a focus of the genre, its background to beautifully created characters. It rounds out the stories making them somehow richer, and far more fierce than you’d think they could be.

I’m a sucker for a good line.  I’ve been known to close a book and hug it just because I need to roll a phrase around in my head for awhile.  I’ve been known to claim a book is my favorite based on a sentence.  Charles de Lint is like that, in every page.  yes his characters speak like real people, or crazy people, or magic people and all of that is amazing, but there are sentences that just stay with you and they are one of the main reasons I will be a fan of this man until I die.

Read the rest of Jin’s reasons at Bookworm Ninja.

For list of all Charles de Lint Tachyon publications, visit the Tachyon page.

The Very Best of Charles De Lint cover by Charles Vess.

Promise To Keep cover art by Mike Dringenberg. Design by Elizabeth Story.

Eyes Like Leaves cover art by Lauren Kelly Small. Design by Elizabeth Story.