Recent Reads

Changer : a novel of the Athanor, by Jane Linskold. In Linskold's modern-day fantasy, the Athanor are nearly-immortal, preternaturally powerful beings who have been recognized by humans throughout history as gods or as legendary beings like King Arthur, Lilith, Davy Jones, Orpheus, or Elvis. Changer, one of the oldest of them, is the shapechanging trickster-figure known to various cultures as Coyote, Proteus, etc. A solitary by choice, he's forced to once again become entangled with the feuds and politics of the other Athanor when his current family is attacked by an enemy.

Linskold's book, published in 1998, works with some of the same ideas found in Charles de Lint's urban fantasies or Neil Gaiman's American Gods. I found it more immediately appealing than either one, although the continued absence of Christian, Jewish, and Islamic figures from the fantasy-writers' pantheon of modern-day "gods" continues to be notable.