Comparisons have been made to the fantasy of The Lord of the Rings or Michael Ende's The Neverending Story, but The 13½ Lives of Captain Bluebear, while it may employ much of the standard fantasy characters, locations and plot types, is much more akin to the Nonsense rhymes of Edward Lear than to any Tolkien fantasy. The 13½ Lives of Captain Bluebear is like Robin Williams and Monty Python joining to narrate a Harold Shea adventure (see The Compleat Enchanter by L.Sprague DeCamp and Fletcher Pratt). The book is a sendup, complete with wonderful illustrations by the author, of nearly every fantasy (and some science fiction) cliché under the sun: nutty but brilliant scientists, tie-ins between Atlantis and extra-terrestrials, doomed sea-faring ships, lost cities, and tunnel-riddled mountains, to name but a few.

To attempt to summarize the plot of The 13½ Lives of Captain Bluebear is impossible, even if it only covers 13½ of the bluebear's 27 lives. Let me summarize just one life, that in the City of Atlantis (The City with a Future). The bluebear, who incidentally is simply a bear that is blue, arrives in Atlantis having spent some time in a Bollogg's head as well as travelling through dimensional hiatuses. After a description of the multitudinous lifeforms that inhabit the city, the architectural styles and the transportation systems, we find him fighting off Krackertratts -- mutant pigeon-rat-cockroach hybrids -- along with odor-feeding Olfactils and blood sucking cat-bat vampires. Living in a tower of Babel and working in a pizzeria, bluebear invents the double-tiered pizza, then quits that job and becomes the greatest stand-up liar (congladiator) of the Atlantis stage, defeating the sleazy promoter's heavily betted-upon challenger, but dooming himself to be shanghaied onto a soot-enshrouded slave-ship run by a sentient chemical element, but not before he escapes the clutches of a talking Sewer Dragon, while the entire city of Atlantis flies off into outer space under the control of invisible life forms living in its sewers -- and that's only skimming the surface.

While keeping the laughs and adventure at a fever pitch, Moers still manages to write a book that would appeal to and be appropriate for both children and adults. So if you want to travel through a crystalline sugar desert in search of an unapproachable mirage city, gain genius intelligence by catching a communicable disease, fatten up on the carnivorous Gourmet Island, then pack up your bags, pick up a copy of Dr. Abdullah Nightingale's Encyclopedia of the Marvels, Life Forms and Other Phenomena of Zamonia and its Environs (comes complimentary with The 13½ Lives of Captain Bluebear) and reserve a berth on the S.S. Moloch -- and watch out for those Minipirates!