The Yarf! reviews by Fred Patten
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The Yarf! reviews by Fred Patten
Note: This file weighs in at well over 3 MB, including all the cover images. If you’re not on broadband, you probably want to try the low speed version instead.
Welcome to the “Patten’s reviews” wing of the Anthro Library! Since this is a collection of columns from a dormant (if not dead) furzine called YARF!, a word of explanation might be helpful: In its day, YARF! (aka ‘The Journal of Applied Anthropomorphics’) was perhaps the best-known—and best in quality—of furry zines. Started in 1990 by Jeff Ferris, YARF!’s roster of contributors reads like a Who’s Who of furdom in the last decade of the 20th Century. In any issue, the zine’s readers could expect to enjoy work by the likes of Monika Livingstone, Watts Martin, Ken Pick, and Terrie Smith; furry comic strips such as Mark Stanley’s Freefall… and Fred Patten’s reviews of furry books and comics.
Unfortunately, YARF! has been thoroughly inactive since its 69th issue, which was released in September 2003. We can’t say whether YARF! will ever rise again… but at least we can prevent its reviews from falling into disremembered oblivion. And so, with the active cooperation of Mr. Patten, Anthro is proud to present Mr. Patten’s review columns—including the final one, which would have appeared in the never-printed YARF! #70.
Full disclosure: For each reviewed item, we’ve provided links you can use to check which of four different online booksellers—Amazon.com
, Barnes & Noble
, Alibris
, and Powell’s Bookstore—now has it in stock. Presuming the item in question is available, if you buy it Anthro gets a small percentage of the price.
 #1 / Jan 1990 |
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| Title: | Howling Mad | |
| Author: | Peter David | |
| Publisher: | Ace Books (NYC), Nov 1989 | |
| ISBN: | 0-441-34663-4 | |
| Paperback, 201 pages, USD $3.50 | ||
| Availability: | Am / BN / Al / Pw |
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Howling Mad is not the first werewolf tale about a wolf that turns into a man rather than the familiar vice-versa, but it may be the first to use that concept for a serious novel rather than a one-gimmick short story.
Not that Howling Mad is completely serious. At one point, Darlene introduces the humanized wolf, Joshua, to movies by taking him to see An American Werewolf in London
A demonic werewolf (eight feet tall, bipedal, with fiery eyes) is terrorizing a Canadian town and forest. It attacks both men and animals. The only survivor of one of its attacks is the leader of the local wolf pack, who is badly enough wounded that he is unable to escape when found by hunters. The wolf is sold to a New York City zoo, which is where he is when the next full moon turns him into a man. The novel relaxes and segues into his humorous misadventures as he encounters Darlene, an animal-rights activist who can’t hold on to a boyfriend, and she determines to teach him human ways. Yet he is only human for a couple of days each month; the rest of the time, he’s a wolf being hidden in a no-pets-allowed apartment house. He is also a wolf who feels an obligation to his pack and mate, and is torn between his developing relationship with Darlene and his need to return to his forest to help defend it against the monster. And the demonic werewolf has his own agenda in New York to strike against Joshua.
This comedic thriller is primarily about humans, but there are plenty of clever anthropomorphic incidents in it. When Joshua tells of his life as leader of his pack, it’s a good realistic wolf’s-eye description of lupine sociology. When the wolf turns human, he gains human intelligence but not knowledge. (David essentially admits that he stretches coincidence pretty thin in keeping Joshua free in the midst of New York long enough to figure out speech and the necessity of wearing clothes.) When he turns wolf again, he retains his human memories but they are compressed by his wolf’s intellect. This enables Joshua to make many sardonic comments about civilization from the viewpoint of an intelligent animal while he is human. After he becomes a wolf again, David plausibly describes how his wolf’s memory of what he learned as a human might help him battle the demon. Joshua is more richly characterized than a fictional wolf who conveniently has human intelligence. Howling Mad is a novel that is definitely worth adding to Furry reading lists. 
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| Title: | Cat House | |
| Author: | Michael Peak | |
| Publisher: | Signet Books/New American Library (NYC), Sep 1989 | |
| ISBN: | 0-451-16303-6 | |
| Paperback, 255 pages, USD $3.95 | ||
| Availability: | Am / BN / Al / Pw |
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A three-page prologue gives the impression that this novel is going to be very imitative of Watership Down. Fortunately, this is misleading. Cat House is in that genre, the talking ‘realistic animal’ story, but it is refreshingly original and imaginative.
The setup is the same as in Watership Down, or in countless folk tales of how the Maker created the world and all of the furry, feathery, and scaly people upon it. In this case, the focus is upon the cats—
Felis domestica in particular. Their name in Peak’s animal language is the ‘farries’, evoking resonances of both ‘furry’ and ‘faery’.
“But the man will be their friend,” said Farri hopefully.
“The man will be their provider,” said the Creator, “although cats will certainly be able to take care of themselves. Just like man. And just like man, they will have no true friends in the animal world. They will have only themselves, and each other…” (pg. 9)
A large community of farries live together with their paladins (the human companions who feed and protect them) in a modern suburb of San Diego, on the edge of the California desert. The farries love and reward their paladins with affection, but they really prefer to conduct their social affairs outside of their paladins’ notice, in back alleys and vacant lots.
This farri community is different than most. One of the Creator’s rules to all animals is to be fruitful and multiply, which cats do frequently and joyfully. However, some female farries are taken by their paladins to be scarred, after which they no longer go into heat. They can still enjoy the pleasure of mating, but if they cannot go into heat, they are usually fated to watch the toms go courting elsewhere. But this community contains a wise cat, Mistress Halina, who organizes the scarred girls and teaches them how to be sophisticated in attracting the toms. Halina’s Den soon becomes the most popular social spot in the community.
Halina tries to maintain friendly relations with everyone. But one of the toms, Coron, is so disgustingly brutal to the girls that she is forced to order him away permanently. In revenge, Coron starts a campaign to convince the normal females that it is sacrilege against the Creator for cats who cannot bear young to continue mating. Unfocused jealously quickly swells into an organized, self-righteous crusade to force Halina’s girls from the community. At the same time, a drought is driving wildlife from the desert into the housing development. This includes individual menaces such as rattlesnakes and hawks, and a very large menace in the form of a pack of krahstas (coyotes), the age-old enemies of the farries. And this pack has an unusually skillful leader, Dahrkron, a fanatic who believes himself blessed by the Creator to destroy all farries.
Cat House switches back and forth between three viewpoints: Halina and her closest friends, Mahri and Melena, as they try to fight the growing prejudice against them; Dahrkron and his pack as they grow in strength and daring attacks; and Roger Anderson, Halina’s paladin, who works for the San Diego Courier and who suspects that one of his neighbors is engaged in organized crime. This third plot is nicely handled, but it seems to have no connection with the novel other than to serve as an example of the paladins’ own affairs which keep them too busy to notice what is happening among the farries all around them. It feels like poorly-justified padding, which keeps annoyingly interrupting the real story. But despite this, Cat House is a strong enough and unusual enough anthropomorphic novel to make it a must-read title.
#3 / Mar 1990 |
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| Title: | Franky Furbo | |
| Author: | William Wharton | |
| Illustrator: | The author | |
| Publisher: | Henry Holt & Company (NYC), Oct 1989 | |
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| ISBN: | 0-8050-1120-X | |
| Hardcover, 228 pages, USD $50.00 | ||
| Availability: | Am / BN / Al / Pw |
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| ISBN: | 0-8050-1157-9 | |
| Trade paperback, 228 pages, USD $12.95 | ||
| Availability: | Am / BN / Al / Pw |
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William Wiley is an elderly writer of children’s stories. His popular character is Franky Furbo, a magical fox who has adventures with humans and with animals on Earth and in outer space. But the fox is not fictional. In 1944, Wiley was a young American soldier participating in the attack on Monte Cassino during the Allied invasion of Italy. He and a German soldier were caught in an artillery barrage, and both were dying when Franky Furbo saved their lives. It took months for the clever fox to nurse them back to health, during which he told them his life story and helped the two to exchange memories to make them all friends. When Wiley returned to the Army, his insistence that he was saved by a talking fox got him a psychiatric discharge. Nobody believed him except for the girl that he later married. To save his own reputation, Wiley stopped insisting that Franky Furbo was real and turned the fox’s adventures into a series of children’s fantasies. So after forty years, Franky Furbo is a popular fictional character throughout the world, but only William Wiley and his family know that he is real.
Except that they don’t. The novel begins with Wiley’s discovery that his wife has only been humoring him all this time. She loves him but she can’t believe in his delusion. Crushed, Wiley begins to doubt his own sanity. He has to admit to himself that he has deliberately simplified Franky Furbo’s adventures, because even he could not comprehend all that the fox told him—of being able to teleport around the world in an instant, to read minds, to speak all languages, to transmute himself into any shape or size. The only thing that Franky Furbo could not do was to understand why he was so different from other foxes. He had been obsessed with solving the mystery of himself. Now Wiley must also find out the answer, or admit to himself that he is crazy. The only source of information would seem to be the German soldier who Franky Furbo also saved—if Wiley can find him after over forty years.
Franky Furbo is an unusual blend of themes. It is partly a pseudo-traditional young children’s fantasy, partly a novel of psychological self-analysis, partly modern science-fiction, and partly a sophisticated inspirational fantasy (a la Richard Bach’s Jonathan Livingston Seagull
The novel is also a riddle right up to the climax as to whether Franky Furbo is a real or an imaginary character. There are clues throughout the story; for example, consider the author’s name, the protagonist’s name, and the meaning of the Italian word ‘furbo’. (At the risk of getting too cute myself, I will say that Wharton dares to go where Doc Smith only hinted at.) But most importantly, Franky Furbo and other anthropomorphic characters appear often enough through samples of Wiley’s children’s stories, through Wiley’s memories of the ‘real’ Franky, and in other revelations, that the reader will not feel cheated. Don’t let the bland opening put you off; Franky Furbo is definitely a novel that anthropomorphic fans (especially fox fans) will enjoy.
A ‘prepub’ announcement in Library Journal last year stated that, “The story is something of a fairy tale, which may or may not explain why Steven Spielberg is now in the midst of filming it.” Nobody else seems to know anything about Spielberg filming Franky Furbo, so maybe the story was only optioned and then dropped. Or maybe it will still appear on the big screen someday.
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| Title: | Catfantastic: Nine Lives and Fifteen Tales | |
| Editors: | Andre Norton and Martin H. Greenberg | |
| Publisher: | DAW Books (NYC), Jul 1989 | |
| ISBN: | 0-88677-355-5 | |
| Paperback, 320 pages, USD $3.95 | ||
| Availability: | Am / BN / Al / Pw |
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This anthology contains fifteen new stories, plus a brief introduction by Norton, written especially for it. All of them deal with cats in S-F or fantastic situations, and all are well written. Other than that, the editors have aimed at a wide variety of moods, styles, and treatments. There are grim dramas and comedies; adventures on distant planets and in wizards’ dens; tales told by the cats themselves and stories in which humans observe strange things that happen to cats. Some cats are normal; some stories reveal that humans have no idea what ‘normal’ means when dealing with cats. There are ghostly cats, magically enchanted cats, and scientifically bioengineered cats.
The most anthropomorphized cats are the witches’ and wizards’ familiars, in Elizabeth H. Boyer’s Borrowing Trouble, Donna Farley’s It Must Be Some Place, P. M. Griffin’s Trouble, and Ardath Mayhar’s From the Diary of Hermione. Cats encounter, and in some cases save Earth from, interstellar or pandimensional vermin in Jaygee Carr’s Wart, C. S. Friedman’s The Dreaming Kind, Mercedes Lackey’s SKitty, Patricia Shaw Mathews’ The Game of Cat and Rabbit, and Ann Miller and Karen Elizabeth Rigley’s It’s a Bird, It’s a Plane, It’s … Supercat. (One of those is actually an old English folk tale in a S-F setting; see how quickly you recognize it.) There is a shared-world story, Wilanne Schneider Belden’s The Gate of the Kittens, which is set in Andre Norton’s Witch World universe; although Norton’s own story here, Noble Warrior, is a Victorian thriller with a nod to Kipling’s Rikki-Tikki-Tavi
Technically, not all the stories in Catfantastic deal with anthropomorphic cats, but enough do to justify a review of it here. Besides, I hope that none of Yarf!’s readers will be so narrow-minded as to ignore a good story just because its cats happen to be ‘normal’. And several stories feature more than one anthropomorphized cat—not to mention anthro birds, mice, dogs, and even a sea serpent and a hobgoblin or two. The wide variety in Catfantastic means that not every story may be to your taste, but the majority of them should be.
#4 / May 1990 |
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 Cover is of a later Puffin edition |
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| Title: | The Eleventh Hour: A Curious Mystery | |
| Author: | Graeme Base | |
| Publisher: | Harry N. Abrams, Inc. (NYC), Oct 1989 | |
| ISBN: | 0-8109-0851-4 | |
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32 art pages + 7 text pages, USD $14.95 |
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| Availability: | Am / BN / Al / Pw |
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You may not instantly recognize the name Graeme Base, but you are almost certainly familiar with his alphabet book, Animalia
Now Base has followed Animalia up with another art book in the same vein. The Eleventh Hour: A Curious Mystery is an ostensible children’s picture book with rhyming text. It is Horace Elephant’s eleventh birthday, and the wealthy young pachyderm organizes a sumptuous party for himself at his luxurious estate. A number of his animal friends spend the day at party and at play, only to be rudely confronted by a dramatic mystery in the evening. The reader is warned on the first page to watch for clues and hidden messages in each picture. The fact that some of these clues require the reader to be able to read musical notation, Morse code, mirror writing, rebuses, and Egyptian hieroglyphics, to name just a few of the different codes, emphasizes that this is much more than just a children’s book.
But it is an art book for all ages. Young children can enjoy the lush paintings full of colorfully costumed animals without worrying about the puzzle. The main purpose of the mystery is to give older readers a justification (as if any justification were needed) to study the paintings especially closely, instead of breezing through the book—to consciously see all of the fine details hidden in each complex illustration. Horace is a very wealthy elephant, and his home is a palace rich in architecture and interior décor of all history from the temples of Karnak to the drawing rooms of Mozart’s patrons. The party costumes of Horace’s animal guests are a treat for connoisseurs of lavish clothing and jewelry.
The solution of the mystery is given, with a listing and explanation of the hidden messages, in a sealed section at the back of the book. You had better check the copy of The Eleventh Hour that you pick up before you pay for it, because of eight copies at the bookshop where I got mine, only two were in fact sealed. The seal is a paper wafer designed by Base especially for this book. You will miss a minor but delightful bit of his art if your copy of the book does not have it.
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| Title: | The Coachman Rat | |
| Author: | David Henry Wilson | |
| Publisher: |
Carroll & Graf Publishers, Inc. (NYC), Oct 1989 |
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| ISBN: | 0-88184-508-6 | |
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171 pages, USD $13.95 |
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| Availability: | Am / BN / Al / Pw |
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This is the story of the rat that Cinderella’s fairy godmother transforms into a human coachman to take her to the Prince’s ball, and of what happens after the stroke of midnight. The coachman, Robert, reverts to his rat form but retains his human intelligence and speech. Neither rat nor human, yet both, he struggles to discover where he now fits into the societies of men and of rats—and he innocently brings tragedy and doom to all.
The jacket blurb describes The Coachman Rat as “a brilliant and provocative” retelling of “the fantasy-horror tale” of Cinderella
This “gripping fantasy” is more than just a retelling of Cinderella. There are equally strong portions of the Pied Piper legend and of the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror in it. Wilson blends them together very imaginatively. Yet the novel reeks of a self-conscious cleverness that stifles any real emotion. All of the characters are stereotypes, introduced one at a time and displayed to be seen for what they are before being activated to react against the other stereotypes. Amadea (Cinderella) is Goodness; the Prince is Nobility; Biggs the drunkard is Greed; Dr. Richter the scientist is Intellectual Pretension; Jenkins the scholar is Humanity; the scheming Devlin is Politics; John the palace guard is the Easily-Misled Masses—and Robert is Everyman, the Fool of the Tarot deck, an innocent who has the capacity and the opportunity to develop into anything, and who is molded through carelessness and callousness into a grim punisher. There are some witty lines, some convincing philosophical arguments, and some unexpected plot twists. But it remains a clever puppet play rather than a live drama. These puppets perform until all of their strings have been cut. Then it’s all over. Applause for the author, please.
#5 / Jul 1990 |
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| Title: | Carmen Dog | |
| Author: | Carol Emshwiller | |
| Publisher: |
Mercury House (San Francisco), Mar 1990 |
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| ISBN: | 0-916505-70-2 | |
| Hardcover, 161 pages, $15.95 | ||
| Availability: | Am / BN / Al / Pw |
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| ISBN: | 0-916505-77-X | |
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Trade paperback, $9.95 |
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| Availability: | Am / BN / Al / Pw |
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Mercury House is strongly promoting this as “a feminist Animal Farm
Females are changing throughout the world. Female animals are evolving into humans; female humans are devolving into animals. Pooch is a pedigreed golden setter who is the devoted pet of an upper-class couple, from whom she has picked up a passion for opera. Pooch finds herself taking on more and more of the household wifely chores, including minding the baby, as her mistress degenerates into a nasty snapping turtle. One day when the master is on a business trip, the mistress becomes too dangerous to stay around. Pooch flees with the baby into the streets of New York City.
The world’s men are extremely annoyed. They are sure the females are doing this just to be contrary, to upset the natural order of male dominance. A doctor gets a government grant to perform electroshock research on the womanized animals. Among those caught and delivered to him are Pooch and the baby. (Pooch had managed to see a performance of Carmen before her capture and is now calling herself Pucci; she dreams of becoming an opera star.) The doctor shocks everyone, including the baby. His assistant is his dumpy wife, Rosemary, who seems kindly but is too passive to restrain him. (Besides, a good wife does not contradict her husband.)
Pucci and the other animal-women escape. She hopes to find refuge with an operatic impresario, Valdoviccini, but he is, alas, more interested in her for reasons of lust than for her talent. The government decides that women are more trouble than they are worth. It constructs an Academy of Motherhood on Fifty-seventh Street:
It looks rather like a fortress; indeed, it is a fortress, for no one wants motherhood defenseless in the modern world, or at the mercy of primitive forces. Major stumbling blocks are the mothers themselves. (Perhaps in the future a small monetary reward for mothering might not be out of line.) It is hoped that, under the aegis of the Academy of Sciences, motherhood will be modernized and mechanized and become a true science. (pg. 110)
Meanwhile, the animal-women are being gathered into a secret sisterhood, whose leader is none other than Rosemary. To keep the police from seizing Rosemary, many of the animal-women disguise themselves in Rosemary rubber-masks and frumpy housecoats. The police disguise themselves as Rosemarys to infiltrate the feminist movement. Rosemary advises the women to disguise themselves as policemen to infiltrate the military-industrial leadership. Soon New York is filled with badly-disguised Rosemarys and policemen rushing about. There is more, but it all ends in a grand climax in which everyone realizes that mankind and womankind should live in harmony as equals – “Neither Conqueror nor Conquered; Neither Victory nor Defeat”, as Pooch titles the grand aria in the opera she writes to commemorate the birth of this new world.
Carmen Dog is full of animal-women in various stages of hybridization: Chloe, the sexy Siamese cat woman; Mary Ann, the awkward duck(?)/swan(?) woman; Isabel, the murderous wolverine woman; and more. This is a different and a clever novel, but it may be too self-consciously literary and affected for the tastes of the average Furry fan.
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| Title: | BRIXOI | |
| Author: | Tom Foster & Ken Fletcher | |
| Publisher: |
Neo-Zagatine Press, Apr 1990 |
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| ISBN: | — | |
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100 pages. $10.00 (incl. postage & handling) |
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| Availability: | Am / BN / Al / Pw | |
2007 note: In its initial 1990 appearance, this review contained information on where to order BRIXOI from. Since this information is no longer accurate or relevant, it has been deleted from the current presentation.
BRIXOI is a Neo-Zagatine publication of exactly 100 81/2" x 11" pages, issued simultaneously by Ken Fletcher in Minneapolis and by Tom Foster in Memphis. Ken Fletcher and Tom Foster have been drawing funny animals for years in fanzines, and this is a sampler of their work. Some pages are drawn by Ken Fletcher. Some are drawn by Tom Foster. Some are drawn by both Tom Foster and Ken Fletcher. A lot of the art is brand new, while other pages are reprints of old fanzine covers, personal Christmas cards, convention flyers, and the like, going back to 1982 or 1971 or whenever. (The copyright date on page 31 is 30,000 B.C.)
The book? fanzine? folio? is divided into four sections: The Art of Getting Around; The Cartoon Artist; In Search of Frogsworth; and Miscellaneous Row. But there is no real continuity. BRIXOI is just a collection of (presumably) what Foster & Fletcher consider to be some of their best fanzine funny-animal drawing of the past couple of decades. Sober and drunken funny animals. Funny animals flying spaceships and driving Model Ts. Funny animals playing the piano or washing dishes. Funny animal carpenters and sheriffs and bag ladies and politicians and soldiers and mythological deities. 100 pages of funny animals. An inside-back-cover Afterword refers to this as “the first book of BRIXOI”, so maybe there are more coming. I can certainly remember some great funny animal drawings by Fletcher and/or Foster over the past twenty years that are not in this volume, so there is room for more.
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| Title: | Normal u.s.a.—chili maneuvers | |
| Author: | Michael Jantze | |
| Publisher: |
Harvest Moon (Los Angeles), 1988 |
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| ISBN: | — | |
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200 pages, $7.50 + shipping & sales tax |
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| Availability: | Am / BN / Al / Pw |
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2007 editor’s note: In its initial 1990 appearance, this review contained information on where to order Normal u.s.a. from; since the book is on the author’s website for all to browse freely, that information has been deleted from the current presentation.
Do newspaper comic strips such as Berke Breathed’s Bloom County
Normal u.s.a. has a mostly human cast, but there are a few delightful fantasy-animal characters, notably A. C., the beer-drinking armadillo whose relationship to the protagonists, Norm and Lynn, is halfway between a pet and a self-invited permanent house guest. (He cooks up a mean pot of chili.)
#6 / Aug 1990 |
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The Redwall Trilogy, by Brian Jacques. Illustrated by Gary Chalk.
 Cover of the Philomel Books edition |
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| Title: | Redwall | |||
| Publisher: | Philomel Books (New York), Mar 1987 | |||
| ISBN: | 0-399-21424-0 | |||
| Hardcover, 351 pages, $15.95 | ||||
| Availability: | Am / BN / Al / Pw |
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| Publisher: | Avon Books (New York), Mar 1990 | |||
| ISBN: | 0-380-70827-2 | |||
| Paperback, 351 pages, $4.50 | ||||
| Availability: | Am / BN / Al / Pw |
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| Title: | Mossflower | |||
| Publisher: | Philomel Books (New York), Sep 1988 | |||
| ISBN: | 0-399-21549-2 | |||
| Hardcover, 431 pages, $16.95 | ||||
| Availability: | Am / BN / Al / Pw |
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| Title: | Mattimeo | |||
| Publisher: | Philomel Books (New York), May 1990 | |||
| ISBN: | 0-399-21741-X | |||
| Hardcover, 448 pages, $16.95 | ||||
| Availability: | Am / BN / Al / Pw |
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The Redwall novels teeter between a juvenile and adult readership. The original British editions are published by Hutchinson Children’s Books, Ltd., but the U.S. paperback edition by Avon Books is packaged as an adult literary fantasy “in the glorious tradition of Watership Down”. The final novel has just appeared in hardcover, and the first has just been reissued in an ‘inexpensive’ mass-market edition.
The trilogy is actually closer to an anthropomorphized version of Tolkien. Jacques’ world does not have magic, but his animal characters wear clothing, build their own houses and castles, and fight with their own swords and crossbows. Like Tolkien’s Hobbits, Jacques’ protagonists are peaceful yeomen (mice, moles, squirrels, rabbits, badgers) whose community is menaced by an army of carnivorous conquerors (weasels, rats, stoats, foxes) led by a truly evil commander. The woodland community must train itself to fight for its survival. One among them stands out as a warrior, and he must go on a dangerous quest while his mates try to hold the invaders back until he can return with aid.
Redwall is the story of the castle-like monastery of that name, an abbey in the forested land of Mossflower. Matthias is a young mouse in training to enter its Order of healers and scholars. However, he is more fascinated by the legend of Martin the Warrior, the brave mouse who drove away Mossflower’s enemies generations ago. When Mossflower is invaded anew by the hordes of Cluny the Scourge, a rat who combines the attributes of Attila the Hun and Genghis Khan, Matthias proves to have the skills of leadership to rally a resistance against them. But Matthias is convinced that he must obtain Martin’s long-missing sword before he can be a true warrior, so he leaves on a long quest to find it, while his friends grimly defend Redwall Abbey during the increasingly desperate siege.
Mossflower is Martin’s story. It is basically Redwall with the details reversed. Martin is a young Northern barbarian mouse who wanders into Mossflower, an animal community that had been conquered a generation earlier by the wildcat Verdauga and his mustelid ruffians. Verdauga has just been succeeded by his sadistic daughter Tsarmina, who is so murderous that she provokes the sullen Mosslanders into open revolt. Where Redwall was about vicious predators attacking the peaceful animals in their abbey, Mossflower is about the peaceful animals escaping into the woods and forming a Robin Hood-style peasant army to besiege the villains in their dark castle of Kotir. But the peasants fare badly against Tsarmina’s trained fighters, so Martin and two companions leave on a quest to find the legendary badger warrior, Boar the Fighter, and enlist his aid. Again the novel splits into two parallel stories, that of the heroic questors and that of the woodland animals battling to save themselves and their home.
Mattimeo features three parallel stories. Slagar the Cruel, a fox injured in the battles of Redwall, returns about a dozen mouse-years later for revenge. He kidnaps the community’s children, including Matthias’ son Mattimeo, and takes them to be sold into slavery to he rats of the underground kingdom of Malkariss. Matthias leads a rescue party after the slavers. It has barely left Redwall when the abbey is attacked by an army of crows, magpies and rooks led by General Ironbeak. The novel shifts back and forth between the hardship of young Mattimeo and his playmates as they are dragged towards the evil rats’ kingdom; the adventures of Matthias and his warriors as they race to overtake the slave caravan; and the battles inside Redwall as its woodland defenders are forced down floor by floor into the cellars.
The three Redwall novels bring to mind another comparison; the classical theatrical animated cartoon series such as the Road Runner and the Coyote
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Title: | It’s Raining Cats and Dogs… and Other Beastly Expressions |
| Author: | Christine Ammer | |
| Illustrator: | Cathy Bobak | |
| Publisher: |
Paragon House (New York), Oct 1988 |
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| ISBN: | 1-55778-057-9 | |
| Hardcover, vii + 247 pages, $19.95 | ||
| Availability: | Am / BN / Al / Pw |
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| ISBN: | 1-55778-086-2 | |
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Trade paperback, $9.95 |
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| Availability: | Am / BN / Al / Pw |
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| Publisher: |
Dell Publishing/Laurel Books (New York), Nov 1989 |
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| ISBN: | 0-440-20507-7 | |
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No illustrations: viii + 279 pages, $5.95 |
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| Availability: | Am / BN / Al / Pw |
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The title tells it like it is. The Preface defines it further: “The nearly 1,000 terms in this book are arranged into nine general animal categories: cats, dogs, domestic fowl, farm animals, wild animals, birds, reptilians and amphibians, insects, and marine animals. They are roughly alphabetical within these categories, but the reader is advised to consult the complete index at the back of the book.”
This is a brisk and chatty dictionary of animal-related expressions in modern English, such as blind as a bat. Cats and dogs are popular enough to merit chapters of their own. Other animals are clumped into broader categories. For some animals, such as the horse, there are three or four pages filled with phrases. For others, such as the ostrich, there is only a single term.
The general format for each entry is to begin with a literary quotation which alludes to the animal (e.g., “Paulina her first husband made a stag.” Thomas Pecke, Parnassi Puererium (1659)); to define the origin of the animal’s name (from Latin, Old English, or whatever); to briefly describe the animal’s characteristics; and finally to cite the catchphrases, with an attempt to establish their origins or at least the period to which their earliest usages have been raced. Ammer also includes some negative information; for example, she reveals that the term crazy as a loon does not derive from that waterbird’s maniacal-sounding cry, but the other way about. The bird was called the diver until the early 17th century, when people began to use the name loon because it sounded like a lunatic laughing. Phrases cited go back as far as the Old Testament and Æsop’s fables (which Ammer dates to 570 B.C.), and are as recent as current sports slang and comic-strip references.
The book is designated by its publisher as ‘humor/reference’, indicating that it is equally appropriate for pleasurely browsing and for serious etymological study.
There is a good index, making it easy to locate each term. In addition to the expressions and definitions themselves, here is interesting information on the evolution of animal names (e.g., hound was the general English word for all dogs until about 1050 A.D., then dog replaced it and hound came to mean specifically a dog used for hunting), and on the invention or creation of items with animal-related names such as hot dog and hobby-horses. There are even references to Warner Brothers’ Bugs Bunny and to Al Capp’s Skonk Works—which call attention to the only omission that I noted; there is no mention of a Mickey Mouse affair as a term of disparagement. (There is also no mention of E. C. Segar’s Eugene the Jeep, which popularly was the inspiration for the name of the U.S. military’s well-known General Purpose vehicle, but that could be justified on the grounds that the book does not include references to fantastic or mythological animals at all.)
It’s Raining Cats and Dogs… is very comprehensive in its coverage. Ammer is a professional lexicographer with numerous dictionaries and similar educational books to her credit. The original edition came out in October 1988, but it is still available in bookshops. Now there is also a popular paperback edition, in Dell/Laurel’s The Intrepid Linguist Library series, which is priced more conveniently for a fan’s personal bookshelf. Note, however, that the Laurel edition does not contain the humorous cartoon illustrations of the Paragon House edition.
#7 / Sep 1990 |
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| Title: | Skywater | |
| Author: | Melinda Worth Popham | |
| Publisher: |
Graywolf Press (St. Paul, MN), May 1990 |
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| ISBN: | 1-55597-127-X | |
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206 pages, $17.95 |
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| Availability: | Am / BN / Al / Pw |
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Skywater is a superb nature novel in the tradition of Jack London’s
