Bookworm

I've recently finished two novels by Walter Moers, The City of Dreaming Books and Rumo and His Miraculous Adventures. Both are fantastic, escapist stories of sci-fi protagonists embarking on relatively traditional quests. Dreaming involves a deathbed promise, while Rumo follows his heart. The twist in both novels are the characters themselves and the settings.Dreaming takes place in both Lindworm Castle and Bookholm, two cities populated with evolved dinosaurs noted for their adoration of the written word. Lindworm, famed for its writers and their intimate knowledge of the Orm, opens the story as the main character's authorial godfather draws his final breaths, reveals a secret manuscript (the best he's ever read), and demands his nephew find the author in Bookholm. The Orm is their version of the muse. Of course he sets of in the following weeks, a relative bumpkin in the bustling city of Bookholm, and falls into the mischievous and nearly Machiavellian constructs of the city's puppet-master. He's locked in the bowels of the city, where all the most expensive and valuable novels are stored, forgotten about, and then hunted by Bookhunters. Oh yeah, there are Bookhunters who do just what the name says and do it well. They're a militant bunch, very superstitious, that play a major role as the novel winds down. I feel in love with the book as I crashed through the pages, consuming Moers' words and illustrations and quickly went out to purchase Rumo immediately after the final page of Dreaming.
Rumo is a Wolperting (that's him, laughing in the middle; note the horns), a mythological hybrid of a wolf and a deer, renowned for its ferocity and fighting ability, a true warrior. Faster than any other creature in Zamonia, most citizens offer a wide berth when Wolpertings linger and avoid their private city entirely. Full of adventure and action, we follow the main character from his first steps to his first love, grazing past the varied species of Zamonia as Rumo fights to find and win his true love. With a slower pace than Dreaming, I better appreciated Moers' ability to create landscapes and entire worlds similar to our own, yet wrought with the amazing creatures of living dreams. He loves to play with words and develop characters in an entirely new setting.

Like Terry Pratchett and Discworld, Walter Moers exceeds at his chosen task to enhance our perspective of reality by exaggerating imagination and drawing upon the classic quest scenario, full of hero worship and insecurity. Moers explores the basic requirements for heroism and humanizes the fantastic worlds we each created as children. It is pure and enjoyable; plus, the illustrations are little treasures strewn throughout the novel, adding a sense of whimsy to some very tense situations.