de Lint is one of my favorite authors, but this early work of his was disappointing to me. Why? 1) he uses names that are unpronounceable. For some reason, I want to be able to pronounce the names in my head, and I hate not being able to do that. The names are filled with apostrophes and other punctuation marks that irritate me. 2) Too many characters. The whole RCMP subplot should have been cut from the book. 3) he has this one character always swearing with these really nasty swears: "Lord lifting Jesus" (what on earth is that, anyway) and "Lord dying Jesus." He did it so often that it got to be really distracting and it would pull me out of the narrative to fulminate about the swear every time it happened. Not to mention that as a Christian, I found it incredibly offensive.

Plot: girl finds some strange Indian artifacts, lives in house with a soul, evil is afoot, girl and guy go to alternate dimension to stop the evil. Add about 100 characters to this with about half of them having unpronounceable names, and there you have it.

This book won't put me off de Lint for good, but I'm not rushing out to get the next in his list, either.