Voice of the Fire

The Voice of the Fire is set within the same ten mile radius of Northampton that Alan Moore has spent most of his life in ("Alan Moore").  The setting of the story entails twelve different people at different moments in time within a roughly six thousand year time span.  Each character discovers something new and telling about the land and all are a mixture of reality, history, and Moore’s vivid imagination.  Moore chooses to use dialect and linguistics to the extreme from the start of the book.  He introduces you to a man that is a mentally retarded caveman who regales his misadventures to the reader in his broken, simple, and imaginary speech.   As Moore leaves the caveman’s story behind he ventures on to the next eleven stories all with progressively growing vocabulary but distinctly different dialects.  True to his style he implements original female characters that do not display normal stereotypes that are the go to in literature.  These women are cunning, sometimes magical or mythological, and intelligent.  Moore uses elements of Northampton mythology and history to give the story a reality that can only be found in something that is half-truth.  The last epoch of the novel is presumably from Moore himself though it remains a work of fiction.  Fittingly enough, Moore’s protegee  Neil Gaiman, introduces the book with his own insight into the exciting, yet often heart wrenching, adventures of the group. 

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“Alan Moore.”  Top Shelf Productions.  Top Shelf Productions, Inc, n.d. Web. 30 April 2013.  

Moore, Alan. Voice of the Fire. Marietta: Top Shelf Production, 2009. JPEG file.

Moore, Alan. Voice of the Fire. Marietta: Top Shelf Production, 2009. Print