Books like The Book of the Dun Cow

This unique book, written in 1978, is grisly, gritty, earthy, painful, and beautiful. I have never read anything like this book before. It is a creation of great courage. Wangerin has taken stark good and evil and played them out in an almost predictable manner, unafraid of arrangements that could be called clichéd, trite, childish, overused. He uses mythology freely. It might at first seem hopelessly dated; rather, it is hopefully dated, it is searingly modern, it is genuinely classic and therefore timeless. It is a Medieval morality play, characters sharply drawn, clean-cut bestial caricatures—but they are fully human. It is in the diction of the Old Testament. Full of talking animals, a small-scale realm unto itself, an epic of good-and-evil with Homeric battles, virtues and vices embodied in fur, noses, claws, wings, beaks…, great geo-political problems ensconced in a farmyard or forest. The creatures are real, three-dimensional, lovable and complex. The battles are heart-breaking, as bloody and horrific as those before the walls of Troy, yet the combatants are ants, sheep, rabbits, a dog, a weasel, against basilisks.The diction has the weight of the Prophets, the phrases the tone of another world. Humour, suffering, courage, and profound meaning are couched in the very words of this brilliantly written book. It is a novel unlike any other, and you must read it, read every word, to understand and know what words can do.