Has anybody else had the joy of reading "Silverlock"? Or any of John Myers Myers' other books. When Ace Books reprinted "Silverlock" in the mid-80s, they also reprinted "The Moon's Fire-Eating Daughter" and "The Harp and the Blade" and I was lucky enough to nab 'em both. H&B is okay ... has its moments. "MF-ED" is even more delightful than "S" ... it's about a university English professor who is recruited by the goddess Inanna (a.k.a. Venus, Ininni, Ishtar, Atargis, Astarte, Anahita, Lakshmi, Dione, Morgan, Freya, Niam, Nimue and many other aliases, including Semiramis ;) and referred to as "the goddess of love and other natural disasters") to survey "The Road", her name for the history of literature. Here's the blurb from the front of my paperback edition:
In the beginning was the word ...
This god of letters fellow who would later call himself Mercury handed me a tankard and said, "Have one for the Road." As I accepted, I suddenly felt myself falling ...
It was a sobering experience. When I came to, I was sitting around a campfire in a buckskin breechclout somewhere in old Mesopotamia and listening to an earlier version of this same heavenly bloke working hard at the chore of giving the Cosmos shape and character. Still later, I, a humble shepherd, and my campfire companions, would-be poets all, would witness the miracle of reed marker put to mud -- the birth of the written word.
"But who'd keep a hunk of mud around for fifty years?" one of my companions objected.
The first literary critic had spoken.