“The footfalls are those of Panther and his panthers. And who is Panther? Panther is Pan-Therion or Pan-Therium, the All-Animal, the prototypical animal. He is the cool-fever-flesh from which all others diverge. He is the composite (‘you should have seen some of the things and pieces of things that went into him’) and the generating force. He is the red-clay which is clay-flesh. He is also the Dream-Master.” — The Three Armageddons of Enniscorthy Sweeny “The Panther or Pan-Th

A short post about something that does not seem to be recognized by most Lafferty fans, and that seems to me important: the place of the historical fiction in the Lafferty canon. Most people who love Lafferty love Okla Hannali , which was published by Doubleday in 1972, reprinted by Pocket Books in 1973, and later issued by the University of Oklahoma Press in 1991 as part of its American Indian Series. Lafferty was amused by this Oklahoma Press cover, writing, But the picture

Since acorn worms and the human lineage diverged 570 million years ago, pharyngeal slits for filtering food evolved into gills for extracting oxygen, and later into today’s human upper and lower jaw and pharynx, which encompasses the thyroid gland, tongue, larynx (voice box) and various glands and muscles between the mouth and the throat. Humans and other terrestrial vertebrates actually initiate vestigial gills while embryos, though they disappear quickly and rarely persist