Customer Reviews

The Moon's Fire-Eating Daughter

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If you get excited at the idea of eavesdropping on Avram Davidson and R.A. Lafferty getting drunk together and discussing literary theory, then you really ought to read this book. If you have strict standards about story, plot-line and character development, this book will probably drive you nuts. I read it because I loved Silverlock and this was the only other John Myers Myers book I could get my hands on. It doesn't have the storyline or the character development of Silverlock (or the wonderful poems and songs), but it is even thicker with literary and mythological references. There is a reference book for Silverlock, A Silverlock Companion by Fred Lerner, and there are several online reference guides for Silverlock. The Moon's Fire-Eating Daughter deserves an online reference guide too. The book is almost an incestuous literary orgy, literature feeding off of itself. One of the high points for me was a discussion among the gods and heroes over whether the rules of form in poetry are a rein on creativity or a goad.

This is a writer indulging himself. If you have a taste for the same indulgences, you may get a kick out of it.

Marketed as the sequel to Myers' great underground classic, `Silverlock', `The Moon's Fire-Eating Daughter' is no such beast, although it does bear a family resemblance to that former work, as a particularly fierce house cat might to a tiger. Both books are romps through the entirety of literary history, but it is there that the similarities end. Whereas `Silverlock' was a feast of literary creations, `The Moon's Daughter' introduces us to the creators, or makers, as Myers would have it. But the most important difference between them is that while `Silverlock' functions on several levels, with a story that can stand alone as a fantasy adventure even to those who miss the most obvious of its literary, historical, and mythological references, `MF-ED' has no story worth speaking of, and if you are not amused and charmed by Myers' literary game playing, there is no reason to read it.

George Puttenham is the book's hapless hero, a bored professor of Economic Geography, who is swept out of his dull routine by the godess Venus (the fire-eating dame of the title, AKA Ininni, Ishtar, Aphrodite, Astarte, etc.), and assigned the task of making a survey of the Road - a highway that is none other than the continuum of all of literary history. On that Road, he travels from ancient Sumer to Homeric Troy, from deep in the Goof Stream of the Ocean to the star Aldbaran and the planet Mercury. Along the way, he encounters most of the great writers and poets of history, (also cut loose from their respective times), mostly in bars, and they all get blotto and sling about ribald tales. Some of these encounters, such as the fist fight between Walt Whitman and William Wordsworth over which of them has a bigger ego (they reached a compromise - agreeing that William had the ranking ego, but that Walt's was based on flimsier grounds, and therefore a purer vanity) are pure gold, but unless you have a couple of PhDs in literature and comparative mythology, you are unlikely to appreciate all of the many such encounters equally.

Nor is it only the required wide knowledge of literature and mythology that limit this book's accessibility. Myers wrote the book using an exaggerated 1930s street slang that sounds like Sam Spade with a heavy brogue. It is somewhat easier to decipher than Burgess' `A Clockwork Orange' or Joyce's `Finnegans Wake', but not by much, and unless you bring a real commitment to completing it, you are likely to give up before you get the hang of the lingo.

I have read the majority of John Myers Myers' books, and am a huge fan, and as such, I enjoyed parts of this book. There are places where his idiosyncratic charm shines through and rewards the effort, but as a whole, `The Moon's Fire-Eating Daughter' misses the mark of Myers' typical magic. It is interesting as a literary curiosity, but should be avoided by all but the boldest of literary connoisseur, and the most devoted of Myers' fans.

Theo Logos

and Your a professor of letters from the 1930's, and drunk you might get this but is really pretty incomprehensible to anyone else, even the well read.

What happened?!

If you're reading this review, then apparently you've read or heard about SILVERLOCK by the same author, a parody so good that it would even give that parody-factory TERRY PRATCHETT a run for his money.

What happened to the sequel?!

I've tried to read this book twice. Both times I never got further than the first few chapters. Why? Because the book reads like a sick, cruel mix of Roget's Thesaurus and the most obscure literary references one could find. It's almost as if the author was thinking to himself: If my readers thought I was witty in SILVERLOCK, wait until they get a load of this!

If you haven't read SILVERLOCK, by all means read it--it's a true parody classic for the fantasy and literature genres. If you have already read SILVERLOCK, I'd only read this book if you are some literary genius out to challenge yourself.