Out of the Loud Hound of Darkness: A Dictionarrative

by Karen Elizabeth Gordon

Traveling on from The Deluxe Transitive Vampire and Torn Wings and Faux Pas (chosen by the Los Angeles Times Book Review as one of the best books of 1997), Karen Elizabeth Gordon continues her wildly imaginative romp with Out of the Loud Hound of Darkness through a gothic landscape of language and her mythically Balkan world, a howling terrain and a cast of rampageous, eerie characters. Myriad underground passages harbor mementos of horrific history, as the young dragons and au pair discover in their explorations.

Through this spellbinding narrative, with its brigands, coiffeur, Count Ghastly, moguls, alchemical queen, courtesan, contrary cartographer, and cross-dressing cowboys, Gordon illuminates the mysteries of usage, speeding the reader to expertise with such confusions as decry/descry, fatal/fateful, displace/misplace, precipitate/precipitous, and masterful/masterly. A companion lexicon, which includes anomie, farouche, quidnunc, internecine, obloquy, fatidic, and noetic, continues the tales and intrepid trek, all the while treating war, power, and celebrity cults with satirical wit and insight.

With Out of the Loud Hound of Darkness Gordon lures you into the intricacies and pleasures of language through a brooding, hilarious fabric of fiction.

Genres: Writing, Language, Nonfiction, Reference

210 pages, Hardcover

First published October 27, 1998

About the author

Karen Elizabeth Gordon, who is most well-known for her comic language handbooks The New Well-Tempered Sentence and The Deluxe Transitive Vampire, is also author to a collection of short stories published by Dalkey Archive Press. The Red Shoes and Other Tattered Tales was hailed by many critics as Rabelaisian in its humor.

Gordon resides alternately in Berkeley, California and Paris.

from http://www.dalkeyarchive.com/catalog/...

Reviews

[Linnea · Rating 3 out of 5]

Despite it's somewhat prescriptivist nature, you have to love a story about vampires, sex-shifters, and cartographers in a bizarre alternate dimension that doubles as a dictionary for fun words like odalisque.

[Carolyn · Rating 3 out of 5]

I am a fan of the strange and unusual ( Edward Gorey's art, Daria and Bob's Burgers,...) So a book like this definitely caught my attention. However, there were times I nearly got lost in the characterization mingling in with the unusual form. However, a couple of re readings of the same passage set me on track again. I'm keeping this tome to dip in and out of from time to time.

[Michael Murphy]

Gordon is a great and tireless teacher as well as a creative artist. I highly recommend this and any other book of hers.

[Juli · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great help for studying my GRE vocab in a format more entertaining than memorizing vocab flash cards.

"An acidulous tone had crept into both sidees of the conversation, her side with balsamic asseverations and cloying evasions, his with a bite of horseradish astride a malt vinegar redolent of London fogs, fish and chips, and tabloid treacle and gossip (it was, in fact, revolting)."

Balustrade, Punctilio, Persnickety, Factotem, Saturnine, Marzipan, Anodyne, Quidnunc, Macaronic

And much more...

[Beth · Rating 5 out of 5]

fun for word people!

[Ana]

lots of word definitions! and a crazy story and characters to go along with it