And I had put away
I just finished Mulengro. It was actually pretty good, and quite different from de Lint’s other work.
I make fun of de Lint a lot, because he has some very specific patterns in his writing — his stories tend to be about young women, generally impoverished, usually living in Toronto or Montreal. They’re mostly musicians, and always seem to end up finding out that fairies and ghosts are real, and have Many Exciting Adventures. Now of course I continue to read his books, and for a few reasons. First off, he’s an entirely competent writer, and even when he’s in his most repetitive mode, his books are very light and fun to read. Secondly, there are times when he diverges from his well-worn path (even if only a little), and those books are quite fun. Mulengro is one of those books.
It’s about Gypsies, and while it is set in Ottawa, and one main character is a violinist, not much is made of either fact, so it hardly felt like a de Lint book at all. What’s going on is that an evil Gypsy wizard who had been driven mad by the Nazi atrocities he survived has escaped from his mental hospital in Europe. How he ended up in Ottawa is unclear, but he’s on a mission to cleanse the Rom race of those whom he considers to be traitors to the race. He has control of the ghosts of the dead, what the Rom call mule (whence he gets his eponym, incidentally) and he uses them to kill people all over town. Eventually, the police get involved, and we meet another Rom witch, named Ola. She runs from him, but after meeting some friends and learning that she has to stand up to him, she eventually confronts and defeats the Mulengro with her own ghosts and a good bit of self-sacrifice.
There were some strange and ultimately useless subplots, and a common problem with horror stories, where the author realizes that the bad guy / monster hasn’t done anything really horrific for a while, so he invents some new characters who are then immediately slaughtered and then have no further impact on the story. It’s annoying, but expected.
Now I’m reading the final dinosaur book, Dinosaur Conquest. I am glad this series will be over soon.