The Elfish Gene: Dungeons, Dragons and Growing Up Strange
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A laugh-out-loud funny memoir about a Dungeons & Dragons-addicted youth. Publishers Weekly As a 12-year-old in England in 1976, Barrowcliffe (Lucky Dog) made a fateful choice: he started playing Dungeons and Dragons. Role-playing games were just beginning their rise, and Barrowcliffe, along with 20 million other socially maladapted boys, spent his adolescence in dining rooms and basements as a druid, warrior or magician, throwing oddly shaped dice and slaying monsters. While D&D allowed Barrowcliffe to escape his mundane, much-bullied existence in an all-boys school, it also threw him into an equally cruel nerdiverse of Nazi wannabes, boys with nicknames like Rat and Chigger, and his polymath, Falstaffian best friend who once ate a still-frozen chicken pie on a bet. Barrowcliffe, whose own schoolboy nickname was "Spaz," wonderfully captures the insensitivity, insecurity and selfishness of the adolescent male. His eye for the oddities of 1970s British life is equally astute. At times, Barrowcliffe's relentlessly self-deprecating humor descends into a tedium of self-loathing. The book also loses some of its focus toward the end when D&D gives way to heavy metal clubs and tolerant girlfriends. However, these are minor imperfections when measured against the quality of the author's vision. Barrowcliffe renders all the comedy and sorrow of early manhood, when boys flee the wretchedness of their real status for a taste of power in imaginary domains. (Nov.)Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
1 An Unhealthy Interest 12 The Last Sunshine 53 Come to Mordor, It's Nicer Than Where You Live 124 Lord of the Ring Binders 265 The Land of Shadow 366 A Journey in the Dark 537 Being Andy Porter 698 Pale Exile 829 A Conspiracy Unmasked 8710 A Light in the West 9211 A Suburban Dragon 10112 The Gathering of the Clouds 11113 An Unexpected Party 12214 Out, Daemon, Out! 13515 Vigils 14616 Pilgrimages 15117 Moonchild 16818 The Sorcerer's Apprentice 17619 In the Cave of the Svartmoot 18520 Time of the Hawklords 19421 Character Assassination 20222 The End of Days 21523 Girls and Other Non-human Creatures 22524 A Short Cut to Mushrooms 23125 The Worlds Collide 23926 The Breaking of the Fellowship 24727 Dabbling with Reality 25228 The Shadow of the Past 25929 The Lost Boys 26530 Homeward Bound 276
