Haunting used bookstores is a favourite pastime of mine.  It is especially therapeutic for the times when I become dissatisfied with the current offerings on the fantasy shelf in Coles or Smithbooks (take your pick, they are both owned by the same parent company).  Every once in a while, among the familiar titles I find something I've been wanting to read for ages, or something I hadn't heard of before.  Unfortunately this has been a rare occurrence lately, something I had put down to moving out of Victoria, British Columbia (used and antiquarian book capital of Western Canada).  However, I am happy to say that I have had a few good finds in past months, and they are the focus of this issue's column.  Most of these books are fairly old (compared to other works in the genre, not relative to fiction in general), but all of them are worth searching out.  And just to show that there are good books on the new fantasy shelf; I will review the new novel by one of my very favourite authors, Charles deLint.

Anyone with questions, comments or suggestions can write to me care of Transmission, or I can be reached via e-mail at s64ns@morgan.ucs.mun.ca.

The Old Gods Awaken by Manly Wade Wellman (Doubleday, 1979) 
Manly Wade WeIlman didn't begin to write novels about his character, Silver John or John the Balladeer, until after the bulk of the short stories about that character were published. The Old Gods Waken is the first novel about John. This book contains not only folklore drawn from Appalachians of European descent but also from the Native American peoples of the area.  The premise of the novel is that the actions of two English brothers to "awaken" their own European Druidic gods are also awakening an evil that was there even before the first native inhabitants.  Most of the Druid lore in the novel is based on theories current at the time the novel was written (and thus outdated today), but the meshing together of several different folklore traditions makes for an interesting and entertaining read. Like John the Balladeer, this novel is one I would recommend to any folklorist (or anyone else, for that matter).
 

The Perilous Gard by Elizabeth Marie Pope (Houghton Mifflin, 1974; Tempo, 1984)
This is a book about faeries. Not little winged sparkly female humanoids, but thin, mysterious beings who live in hollow hills.  The main character is a young woman named Kate, banished to a remote castle in the north of England for an insult to the Queen that she didn't write.  She stumbles across strange goings-on at Elvenwood Hall, also known as the Perilous Gard, and ends up a captive of the faery Queen.  Without giving away too much of the plot, I can say that the story has recues and escapes, love and friendship, and faery dances in the wildwood.  The idea of what faeries actually are that is followed in this novel is similar to the theory that the belief in faeries originated with memories of sharing the land with an earlier people, but is not quite identical to it and still contains enough magic to satisfy those who read for a regular dose of enchantment.  This is a lovely book with an interesting take on faery lore.  To make it even better, my copy (the Tempo paperback, published in their "MagicQuest" series) has a frontispiece by Terri Windling (who is not just an excellent author and one of the best fantasy editors in the business, but also a wonderful illustrator).
 

Queen of Spells by Dahlov Ipcar (Dell, 1973)
Another book for ballad lovers, Queen of Spells is a slender volume based on Tam Lin, and although it is a slim novel (a mere 142 pages in length) it is full of snatches of ballads and folksongs.  It follows the traditional Tam Lin story fairly closely, but filtered though the author's own viewpoint.  I can't say much more about the book without spoiling the surprises, but I recommend it highly.  It is one of those delightful used bookstore finds that I had never heard about until I found it jammed on the shelf; but am very happy to have discovered.
 

Someplace to be Flying by Charles deLint (Tor, 1998)
Readers of this column will probably have figured out by now that I think deLint is by far one of the best writers in the fantasy genre today.  He is also one of a fairly small number of Canadian authors who have made it big in the US book market.  Most of deLint's past writing has been in the urban fantasy subgenre, and Someplace to be Flying is no exception ("urban fantasy," like "urban legend" is a label that doesn't quite fit, but is commonly used, and most people know what you are talking about when you use it).  The book, like deLint's other works, has a varied cast of fascinating characters ranging from homeless people, to artists, to record store owners, who constantly challenge our stereotypes. Shape-changing is a prominent theme in this novel, as it centres around the "Animal People," ancient, almost archetypal, beings who can take on human or animal shape.  Thus Jack is an old Native American man in one shape, and a jackdaw in the other; the Crow Girls, Zia and Maida, are teenaged punks dressed in black in their human shape, and crows in their animnal shape; and Ray is a tall red-headed man in one form, and a fox in the other.  The plot involves the loss of Raven's pot, which can remake the world, and the Cuckoos, malicious Animal People who find the pot and want to create a world with no humans and no Corvid (Animal People whose animal forms are birds in the Corvid family: jays, crows, ravens, magpies and the like).  As the dust jacket blurb states: "Weaving Celtic and Native creation myths with a modern tale uniquely his own, deLint has created a novel that will forever alter the way we look at the world around us."