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Urban Fantasy Interview: Charles de Lint

October 27, 2009 Charles de Lint is one of the the best known names in urban fantasy.  His Newford novels are set in a fictional, but believable city in North America.  There's less of the hardboiled elements in the books, which puts them closer to the fantasy end of urban fantasy, but the urban setting is still vital.

Genreville: What's been the most fun about putting a contemporary setting into your book?

Charles de Lint: I love the spark that comes when you blend elements from folklore or myth with modern characters and settings.  On a pure visceral level, it's so much fun imagining a Green Man sitting on a park bench, a coyote shapechanger walking down a city street in his cowboy boots and hat, a cluster of fairies in a junkyard...

GV: What part of a real-world setting gave you the most trouble?

CdL: None of it.  The nice thing about a contemporary setting is that you don't have to make it up; you just research it.  And if you do "make it up" as I've done with Newford, and now Santo del Vado Viejo, it's really just based on aspects of the real world that I move around a bit so that I can build up my own mythology for a place.

GV: Which other urban fantasy authors do you admire, and why?

CdL: Thorne Smith and Peter Beagle started me on this journey of appreciation and I retain a fondness for their work because it still holds up, all these years later.  These days it would have to be people like Nina Kiriki Hoffman (anything can happen in a book of hers, but it all follows an internal logic that you eventually figure out), Holly Black (who is so effective at depicting the dark side of faerie without falling into cliché), Patricia Briggs (for her sheer story-telling talent), Alice Hoffman (for her subtle touches that resonate so deeply through her prose) and... oh, there's too many to list them all.  I'm just happy there's so much good reading available.

GV: What do you think is the literary lineage of urban fantasy? Where did it come from, and what subgenres does it draw from?

CdL: As I mentioned above, in the early part of the century writers such as Thorne Smith were already playing with ghosts and the gods of myth wandering through the contemporary (to them) world.  For the present upsurge of interest, I trace the lineage to writers like Megan Lindholm (now writing as Robin Hobb, but here I mean earlier work such as her novel Wizard of the Pigeons), R.A. MacAvoy (Tea with the Black Dragon), Peter Beagle (A Fine and Private Place), and the like.  This was close to the period when other writers (the Scribblies in Minneapolis, myself, etc) were also exploring those same possibilities, and of course we had Terri Windling (then at Ace Books) actively promoting it all with her Fairy Tale series and the other books she was buying at the time. Terri is probably more responsible for this than any writer since she was the editor willing to give a home to so much of this material.

As for what it's drawn from, I can't answer for other writers, but for myself, it was a matter of my reading widely in many genres and wanting to use all those various story elements in what I was writing myself.  So where did it actually come from?  I think it was steam engine time--you know, when it's time for a steam engine, someone will come up with one.  It was time for an updating of fantasy and many of us took up the challenge.

GV: What's your latest book's literary lineage? Whose work influenced yours, and what form does that influence take?

CdL: My last few books (only The Mystery of Grace has been published so far, the others are in various stages of the publication/writing process) have been set in the American southwest.  That landscape and the cultures in it influenced them far more than anything I've read, though I suppose if you're looking it for a literary lineage it would be reading non-fiction writers such as Edward Abbey and Ann Haymand Zwinger who bring that landscape so vividly to life.

I hate to be vague, but pretty much everything I experience (firsthand or through reading, listening) is an influence. Music, certainly.  For these last few books it's groups like Calexico and Rodrigo y Gabriella, but also classic artists such as the various Jimenezs and Lydia Mendoza.

All these influences put me in the mood to be in that landscape while I'm writing.

GV: Where do you see urban fantasy moving in the future? What other elements might get included that aren't today?

CdL: I have no idea.  What I'd like to see is writers coming up with some fresh ideas of their own rather than rehashing the flood of material that's already on the stands.  This current climate reminds me of the late seventies and the eighties when every time you turned around you were tripping over some fat high fantasy quest trilogy.  Now it's all series with paranormal PIs/assassins/whatevers that are becoming rather interchangable to this jaded reader.

Now what these fresh ideas should be has me as puzzled as anybody else.  But I know that's what I'm looking for when I walk into a bookstore looking for something new to read.

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I'm interested in what "something new" might mean in this context, while still remaining urban fantasy.  It's my feeling that you can have something new with many of the same elements that get de Lint feeling jaded.  Just a fresh perspective on the protagonist's inner narrative can be a change.  This is one of the easiet ways to get through to fans of the subgenre: do something new that's a good twist on something old.  Of course, it has to be the right twist.  Just jumping from "vampire assasin" to "weregoat assasin" isn't going to cut it if the setting, internal dialogue, and plot are all the same.

Posted by Josh Jasper on October 27, 2009 | Comments (2)