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Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813
EAN num: 9780765306791
ISBN number: 0765306794
Label: Orb Books
Manufacturer: Orb Books
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 416
Printing Date: August 01, 2003
Publishing house: Orb Books
Sale Popularity Level: 109611
Studio: Orb Books
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Editor's Notes and Comments:
Product Description:
Welcome to Newford. . . .
Welcome to the music clubs, the waterfront, the alleyways where ancient myths and magic spill into the modern world. Come meet Jilly, painting wonders in the rough city streets; and Geordie, playing fiddle while he dreams of a ghost; and the Angel of Grasso Street gathering the fey and the wild and the poor and the lost. Gemmins live in abandoned cars and skells traverse the tunnels below, while mermaids swim in the grey harbor waters and fill the cold night with their song.
Like Mark Helprin's A Winter's Tale and John Crowley's Little, Big, Dreams Underfoot is a must-read book not only for fans of urban fantasy but for all who seek magic in everyday life.
User popularity level:
Rated by buyers 
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Short stories that move in and around eachother, interweaving with beautiful complexity; that is what Dreams Underfoot is. It's classic de Lint style and not to bemissed for anybody who is a fan!
Rated by buyers -
I am not normaly into urban fiction, but this book was recommended to me by a good friend. This book is a collection of short stories all taking place in and around a fictional NE/S Canadian town. The lore that is woven in this book is equally fantastic and beleivable. The characters come to life in a way that makes it seem more a biographical account than a work of fiction, which makes the extraordinary themes in the book not only plausable but seem a matter of fact. If you feel you are missing a little bit of magic in your life then this book (or any other de Lint book for that matter) is what you are looking for.
Rated by buyers 
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This book was recommended to me after I enjoyed Susanna Clarke's 'Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell', and I thought the premise of 'Dreams Underfoot' sounded brilliant.
And it is. Where the book runs into a wall is this: In order to pull off a convincing mesh of plain old reality and amazing fantasy, you very first have to make 'plain old reality' seem REAL.
There is nothing 'real' about the book's 'real world'. Ordinary people in Newford are ordinary in the same way that people on TV are ordinary: everyone's just varying degrees of acceptable and attractive. They speak about as convincingly as they look... dialogue is sometimes stilted to the point of being embarrassing. No one in a modern urban setting actually says "he's soooo dreamy!", and you don't make a convincing Latino character by having him address his "Anglo" (why not 'gabacho' if you want an accurate pejorative?) friend as "Bobby-o". For crying out loud.
I want to love the characters, but they are so predictable and/or unrealistic. Jilly, the one who knows about magic, is an amazing talented artist (of course) who somehow grew up on the streets (yet has no issues at all) and loves everyone, managing to be best buddies with every single person in the city from socialites to hobos (she's just the only person who /understands/). De Lint pretends she's plain by giving her unruly hair and baggy clothes, but then goes on to make a point of how charming and petite she looks.
The socialite girl is fashionable, wants to go do inane things, and doesn't 'get' the Pogues. Of course. The cop is a tough guy with a cigar named Lou who acts hard but really has a soft spot for Jilly. Of course. Street people are never alcoholics and meth addicts, they're just fey and misunderstood. Of course.
I was unable to maintain a suspension of disbelief, no matter how I wanted to. By the time fantasy things happened, I'd already been rolling my eyes at the 'reality setting', and the impact was lost.
This book is not completely bad. The fantasy is undermined by the ridiculous reality, but there are some intriguing and unique concepts presented here and there. My disappointment is heightened by how much I'd been looking forward to reading this and how much I wanted it to be amazing, but overall 'Dreams Underfoot' comes across as simply average... you could do a lot worse, but you could also do a lot better.
Rated by buyers 
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I've really tried to enjoy this author, and this was my third try. Somehow, nothing he writes engages me on any level - the characters are cliches, the "fantasy" is cartoonish (balloon men? walking boogers? hello?), the stories are poorly structured and lack satisfying resolution, and the foreshadowing is as subtle as a kick in the head. I bought this one because the blurb on my edition compared it to Helprin's "Winter's Tale" and Crowley's "Little, Big". It has as much in common with those great works as a raisin has with a glass of wine. It contains words and is marketed as fantasy - that's where the comparison ends. I could not bring myself to finish the book, a rarity for me. Buyer beware.
Rated by buyers -
What a great title, laden with the promise of darkness,mystery, surreality... it leads one to expect a fanatasy with a subterranean feel. Unfortunately the book does not live up to the promise its title makes.
Dreams Underfoot by Charles de Lint is an ambitious collection of urban faery stories, all bound together by several common threads and characters. But several factors hold these stories back from being all that they can be.
At very first one is enchanted with, if not de Lint's somewhat lackluster prose, at least by the unique themes and plotlines. Unique up until the third or fourth story, that is, when one begins to realize the sad sameness of all these tales. After the very first few stories the book becomes a rather tedious read, and one's willingness to forgive de Lint's unremarkable writing style dissipates, like ghosts fleeing daylight.
I can see what de Lint is trying to do with the characters. veiling the extraordinary behind a veneer of ordinariness. Most everyone in the books has brown hair - this seems to be his concept of ordinary. But all the women are pretty and petit - because everyone knows fat bowsers never experience anything supernatural I guess. He's only a little more diverse with the males he portrays; they come off just faintly more realistic than his impossible women. The problem with his characters is not that they are not complex and interesting, its that the devices he uses to make them complex and interesting are so transparent and obvious. One can actually see his formulae for character creation laid out on the page like algebra, and it feels like being cheated.
De Lint flirts a lot with the themes of poverty and homelessness, but he writes it insincerely, romanticizing it shamelessly, and comes off like the proud bearer of white liberal guilt, rather than someone who's been there. I think he wants his ghetto, the 'Tombs', to read like some bitterly cruel otherworld, but it comes off like a series of cardboard cutouts, a rough facade.
It was an interesting enough idea to set his stories in an invented Canadian town. One doesn't see it everyday. But try as he might he never quite manages to make the town seem real enough. And he just doesn't make Canada spooky enough.
Dreams Underfoot is a great idea that would have been better written by someone else.
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