Word: riddley
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From the first sentence, it is clear that Riddley Walker is not an ordinary story...
...resulting dialect has considerable appeal. Often, Hoban merges two words into one, with fascinating results. A woman is a "wooman," says Riddley, because "she's the 1 with the woom." The leader of the mutant survivors of the great flash is known as "the Ardship of Cambry," one who suffers many an "ardship." The most chilling pun has to do with the central myth of Riddley's time, an adaptation of the only document left from before the flash, the Christian legend of St. Eustace. In "the Eusa story," Eusa tampers with "the Littl Shyning Man" and creates the cataclysm...
...rediscovery of the Eustace legend becomes the book's most comical scene, in which Hoban deftly deflates all interpreters of ancient texts. The political leader of Riddley's people--a character named Abel Goodparley, known as Pry Mincer--translates this passage to Riddley...
Beyond its wit, the language of Riddley Walker haunts and challenges in a way that English cannot. Where English is insufficient, Hoban simply invents penetrating new words. The gnawing sensation of terror inside the stomach is the "fearbelly"; both the sight and sound of an angry dog are expressed by "grooling and smarling...
...though the language of Riddley Walker is unfamiliar, the story it tells rings with unmistakable urgency. Riddley runs away from his "crowd"--his community of foragers--and becomes unwittingly drawn in to Goodparley's obsessive quest to regain the technology of explosives. Tantalized by the legendary ability of man before the flash to build "boats in the air and picters on the wind," Goodparley determines to recreate the power that created these mysteries; when he meets Riddley, he thinks he has found the first breakthrough: the ingredients of gunpowder...