Subject: Prograde Reviews--Charles de Lint:Spiritwalk

From: [email-masked] (Aaron V. Humphrey)
Date: Thu, 07 Apr 1994 06:55:21 GMT

Charles de Lint: Spiritwalk

A Prograde Review by Aaron V. Humphrey

Unlike its predecessor, _Moonheart_, _Spiritwalk_ isn't a complete novel
but a short story, a couple of novelettes, and a novella.  I think this
fragmentation works against it.

You see, in _Moonheart_ de Lint managed to bring disparate fantasy elements
together, as he does so well--Celtic and Amerind mythology and
magic(arguably his favourites), in this case.  He also had a sizeable
number of major and minor characters.  He pulled it off because the novel
was about 450 pages long.

_Spiritwalk_ is about 400 pages, but "Ghostwood", the novella, is just over
200--and de Lint tries to get an incident on the same scale happening.  He
also tries to bring in all the(surviving)characters from _Moonheart_, plus
a few new ones who were introduced in the novelettes.  The result is
somewhat cluttered and almost utterly lacking in tension.  It doesn't help
that the major villain does very little directly throughout the story, so
that one never gets any real _dread_ of him as one did for the equivalent
in _Moonheart_.

The novelettes, "Ascian In Rose" and "Westlin Wind", introduce an
interesting pair of characters, but don't develop them as well as they
could--that is left for "Ghostwood", where it just adds to the clutter.
And the opening short story, "Merlin Dreams In The Mondream Wood", is nice
but doesn't connect with the rest of the book except peripherally.  If
_all_ the stories had been separate, this wouldn't have bothered me, but
since they weren't, it does.

It may just be that in comparison to _Moonheart_ this is a letdown.  Who
knows what I would have thought had I read it first.  (It would have
spoiled the ending of _Moonheart_ for me, probably.  Authors like to tell
you that you can read a middle book in a series and not have to have read
the earlier ones, but they don't normally mention that this often spoils
the earlier books for you...)

In all--it's not bad, but don't go in with inflated expectations.

%A de Lint, Charles
%T Spiritwalk
%I Tor
%C New York
%D May 1992
%G ISBN 0-812-51620-6
%P 398 pp.
%S Tamson House
%V Book 2
%O Paperback, US$4.99, Can$5.99

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