2015 read #58: Jack the Giant-Killer by Charles de Lint.

Jack the Giant-Killer by Charles de Lint
210 pages
Published 1987
Read from October 2 to October 3
Rating: ★★½ out of 5

I've been looking forward to the novels of Charles de Lint for almost an entire decade, ever since I saw the hardback debut of Widdershins on the shelves at Borders. During the years of this blog, I've read three of de Lint's short stories -- "The Conjure Man" (reviewed here), "Uncle Dobbin's Parrot Fair" (reviewed here), and "The Bone Woman" (reviewed here) -- all of which I've enjoyed but found pleasant and unsurprising rather than bold or indelible. But I had yet to get to any of his novels, largely because I had never bothered to look up which book opened his Newford series, and kept buying or checking out volumes from somewhere near the middle of the continuity, which of course just wouldn't do as starting places. (I've remedied my ignorance with Wikipedia, and The Dreaming Place is fairly high on my to-read list, but I doubt that I'll get to it before next year.)

A few weeks ago, I chanced upon Jane Yolen's Briar Rose on the shelves of my library, and from there, even though the book in hand wasn't even fantasy by my definition, I began tracking down the rest of the Terri Windling-helmed Fairy Tale Series of novels. My library also happened to have de Lint's entry, Jack the Giant-Killer (though no library in the county seems to have its follow-up volume, Drink Down the Moon). What better place to begin with de Lint than an almost-standalone novel from the crib years of modern Adult Fantasy? From the very first paragraph, alas, which introduces our heroine, gazing at her reflection in numb disbelief after she's hacked off her hair and gone on an Ottawa-style bender after her boyfriend of three months leaves her for being too boring, Jack gets mired in the bog of lazy urban fantasy cliches. De Lint's tendency to be warmly formulaic in his short stories metamorphoses at novel length into a losing struggle with mediocrity. There's a painfully generic Unseelie Court, halfway between an orc horde and the muppets from Labyrinth (but failing at either one), stealing power and territory from a waning Seelie Court on the streets and suburbs of Ottawa; there's a no-nonsense best friend who tries to wisecrack through every situation; there are some cardboard-cutout versions of "good" faeries; there are paragraphs of location details that would make sense only to locals and do nothing to advance the story. The very same year in which Emma Bull made similar (essentially identical) cliches seem fresh and full of pep in War for the Oaks, de Lint seems to be coloring by numbers in a subgenre still barely past the blueprint stage.

There's nothing bad or unpleasant about de Lint's tale here, and Jack is not without its charms, like when Jacky finds her pluck and drives a hard bargain with the fey fiddler Kerevan, but overall, this book is rather thorough in its unremarkableness.