Dungeons & Dragons.
Swords and Spells.
The Dragon’s Den.
The Book of Marvelous Magic.
The Revenge of Rusak.
Creature Catalog.
Caves and Caverns.
Caves of Chaos.
Horror on the Hill.
Castle Caldwell.
Saga of the Shadow Lord.
Sword and Shield.
The Knight of Newts.
The Monster Manual.
The Fiends Folio.
Deities & Demigods.
Legends and Lore.
And the list goes on.
For reasons I’ve yet to uncover (but suspect involved weed) the creators and authors of so much D&D material appear to have had a fondness for alliteration. Almost all of the original characters I created when I was 10, and who inspired this novel, had alliterative names originally and I often found myself thinking that a D&D module, locale, or character wasn’t truly “in-universe” unless its name was alliterative:
Rocco the Rotten.
Sammy the Short.
Billy the Bad.
Dudley the Dwarf. (Remember I was 10.)
And so this passion, this mindset, this madness is displayed throughout this novel where alliteration becomes, I hope, more than just a clever game, and instead a lyrical and rhythmic guide to the prose. My goals are akin to those of a Blues player. Despite the musician limiting his or herself to just five notes with which to weave their works while bending blue notes til their bursting point, we are nevertheless often taken and surprised by just how dynamic and expressive the simple slides and shortened scales can be.
"Keep it simple stupid," is an adage that rarely turns out to be wrong. Limitations can often lead to innovations.
Perhaps alliteration fell out of place in a modernizing world of primarily written rather than oral traditions, for which alliteration offered a mnemonic device to tellers of tall tales. So, I hope my experimentation with consonantal repetition hearkens back to bedtime stories, spoken words with the slight lilt of song-craft, and admittedly, perhaps more Seusical than musical.