Customer Reviews

The reefs of Earth

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The Reefs of Earth is my favorite SF&F book ever found in 43 years of reading. I buy every copy I find in used book stores, just to be able to give a copy of this book to my best friends, and I long ago read my own two copies until they fell apart. Raphael Aloysius Lafferty, always excellent, outdoes himself in telling the story of "six kids, seven if you count bad John", and their efforts to take over the world from the clueless rednecks, parents, and other riffraff currently in charge. Even the prose is poetry, but the poetry, also part of the book, is excellent, good in the sense of Beowulf and battle poetry, not Shakespeare and romantic poetry. He writes about BIG, *hairy* people, ones who usually don't get along very well with one another, and if you have an ear for language, you'll love it.

The story is indescribable; it involves six kids who are aliens from another planet with "Addams Family" tastes but played out realistically. The result is murder, mayhem, and -- strangely -- hilarity too. A VERY weird tale! But the strangest and most memorable part of the book for me was its table of contents -- each chapter title of which formed the line of a POEM! The poem is as weird as the book, and describes the story perfectly:

To slay the folks and cleanse the land
And leave the world a Reeking Roastie:
High Purpose of the Gallant Band
And six were Kids, and one a Ghostie.

A child's a monster still uncurled,
The world's a trap, and none can quit it;
The strife Dulanty with the world,
Was mostly that they didn't fit it.

No setting for the Gallant Brood
In sacred groves of yew or lindens;
They found a hold more near their blood --
A mountainful of murdered Indians!

In brazen clash of Helm and Greave
Fit subject for Heroic Chanty
The battle joined that could but leave
[An]* altered world or dead Dulanty!

*Actually says "Or", but I assume that's a typo.

This book is a hidden masterpiece. The use of poetry is brilliant - even each of the chapter titles come together to form one poem. The characters are the perfect blend of innocence and wickedness. Like no other book you will read!

Six children of the alien Puca families visiting Earth (seven if you count Bad John), decide to make the world a better place, mainly by killing all the people on it, starting with their own parents. As is usually the case with Lafferty's stories, nothing is quite what it seems on the surface, or even below the surface. Is it an exploration of the nature of good and evil? Yes, but also not. It's funny and weird, told in Lafferty's unusual High Tall Tale style, written at the peak of his most creative period, originally published in 1968.

Lafferty had himself pigeonholed as a science fiction author, but the SF veneer here is fairly thin, with a little fantasy thrown in. If anything, the story has fewer "impossible" elements than most of his stories. This story of Irish immigrants in the rural Midwest (or if you insist, alien Puca immigrants to Earth) is strangely savage, marked by the author's typically surreal violence and verbal extravagance. Think of Tom Sawyer rewritten by Stephen King, and you may get some idea. Better yet, just read it.

By the way, I do not think the last line of the chapter title poem "Or Altered World or Dead Dulanty" is a typo. I've seen that slightly awkward formulation of Either/Or somewhere before.