Vince and Sandra Peddle,
The Moon Maiden

The Bull Dancers Trilogy - Book One

How did the old Greek myths come about? One theory claims that real events have been distorted by oral tradition over time and that behind the gods and heroes of myth are real actors to be found.

You can turn around this line of reasoning and try to imagine stories that could be the basis for the myths known to us. The more you allow these tales to be modified over time (and isn't the morphing of a god to a whitch to a human and vice versa substantial modification?) the more poetic freedom you gain in inventing the hypothetic "original". The heroic superman of myth can easily have been a horrible klutz to begin with.

Vince and Sandra Peddle seem to have taken great pleasure to fill the complete cast of the Minos myth cycle with actors of bottommost standards:

An ever-sniveling mother by the name of Aphrodite is kicked out of her home town Patras, together with her three sons, rapish Sarpedon, aggressive retard Rhadamanthys, as well clueless young Thasos, and set adrift in a rudderless dinghy in the middle of the sea. The four are rescued by infinitely altruistic, but just as much demented inhabitants of Knossos: Addlebrained priest Klawiphoros and benighted pseudo-king Asterios, who the four ejected jerks ride roughshod over - page after page in tantalizing dull-witted dialogs.

Having read the first third of the book, the people of Patras have all my sympathy.

The book gains some speed as the focus shifts to young Thasos, who later turns into Minos. He leaves Knossos and does it in the forests of Crete with Britomartis, a female figure embodying nature and untamed fervor. But Thasos isn't much better than his misbegotten brothers: permanently he melts away in self-pity and is simply one sandwich short of a picnic.

I had to force myself to read the book to its very end. The authors manage to stick to their horrible style all the way to the last page. Maybe there is a deep British humor hidden in the book which escaped me. The announcement that there will be two more boks of this series, hits me as a threat.

[The book contains a URL for further information on its background, which today (Oct 2005) leads to a dubious web page advertizing for health insurance]