The Legend of Rah and the Muggles
I assume that some of you are familiar with the story behind The Legend of Rah and the Muggles. For those of you who aren’t, I’ll do my best to be brief. The Legend of Rah was self-published in 1984 by Nancy Stouffer (who currently is published under N.K. Stouffer, for reasons…that will become clear). In addition to being a bad writer, Ms. Stouffer also happens to be batshit insane.
Based almost entirely on their use of the word ‘Muggles’ (even though they are used in entirely different ways) and a few vague similarities between another of Stouffer’s works, Stouffer sued J.K. Rowling in 1999 for copyright infringement. This was despite the fact that Stouffer had never sold any copies of TLORATM, and the little self-publishing company that Stouffer had formed went bankrupt a full eleven years before J.K. Rowling ever visited the United States.
It was a case that Stouffer wasn’t going to win, and it didn’t help when it was discovered that she was presenting fraudulent documents and lying in court. She was summarily fined $50,000.00 and ordered to pay part of J.K. Rowling’s attorney’s fees.
Hoping to cash in on the controversy, a publishing company brought out The Legend of Rah and the Muggles and promptly went bankrupt, which gives you an idea of the quality of Stouffer’s writing. TLORATM is again out of print and N.K. Stouffer is currently campaigning her cause at her atrociously designed website, http://www.realmuggles.com/. Meanwhile, The Legend of Rah and the Muggles holds an Amazon rating of 1 ½ stars out of 5 and a sales ranking firmly inside the ‘nobody cares’ category.
And as I managed to acquire one for a mere two dollars and eighty-six cents, I figured I might as well give it the thrashing it so desperately deserves.
The first thing I would like to point out is that the title is not The Legend of Rah and the Muggles. It’s The Legend of Rah™ and the Muggles™. And up at the top of the cover…well, I’ll just show you:
I think she’s reaching a little bit, to be honest.
Moving inside the front cover, we get the copyright page and it as well is glorious to behold:
Like I said, batshit insane.
Finally we get to the story itself. I want to remind you that this book is marketed towards 9-12 year olds.
We begin with the introduction. An omniscient narrator starts droning on about a place called Aura. They’re fighting a war, but it’s a little confusing. You see, some ‘government representatives’ became greedy. Not governments, just government representatives. I’m not sure how this effects everyone, because Stouffer doesn’t say what happens. Some representatives get greedy, this sows discord, and the next thing you know you have militia groups popping up everywhere.
The narrator explains that there isn’t any real leadership. Wait, what about the government representatives you just mentioned? What happened to the government? Also, in the first paragraph you mentioned they’re fighting wars with other nations, and now it sounds like this one nation is splitting up and fighting a civil war? Which is it?
Maybe I should just move on to page two.
While I’m on the subject, it’s worth mentioning that these pages have enormous margins on all sides with large type. Stouffer gives Tesch a run for her money. This is maybe a ~100 page book, and she drags it out to 264 pages.
Right.
Blah blah, no one was paying attention to the government getting evil under their noses, which brings us to the first epic quote:
Little by little this complacency gave rise to corruption. Nations that were intended to include and respect the rights of all people regardless of heritage or color had slowly mutated into countries defined by class distinction, nations of haves and have-nots.
This seemingly simple erosion of morality gave rise to gross civil unrest, and massive wars resulted (page ix).
That sound you just heard was all of the 9-to-12-year-olds getting bored and chucking the book into the trash.
Out come the nuclear weapons, they destroy half the country, and everyone flees, leaving the have-nots behind. All the old and crippled and disabled, essentially. They’re making their escape on a couple of cruise ships that just happened to be docked at the harbor. I wonder what a couple of cruise ships are doing sitting there so close to ground zero. I might expect a few remaining nuclear submarines and maybe a leaky life raft or two, but cruise ships? Luxury ocean liners? Just chilling out at the edge of a very recent nuclear holocaust?
Stouffer switches from omniscient narrator summarizing the past to recount a scene as the last of the Aurians board the cruise ships. Why? I’m not sure, it doesn’t appear essential to the plot. I’m chalking it up to her being a poor writer. We then switch back to omniscient narrator who explains that the descendants of these old crippled disabled societal rejects living in a nuclear wasteland are the Muggles, who look like human babies, are three-and-a-half feet tall, and can understand any language, even the languages of animals. Also, they somehow survive in a nuclear wasteland. Without the sun. I have no idea what they eat. I still don’t care. None of this is even remotely interesting. On the plus side, we have finally reached the first chapter!
Chapter One – The House of Sheridan
Someone named Lady Catherine escapes just before the enemies batter the door down. And we promptly move into backstory. The narrator tells us that Lady Catherine is also known as Cat. And she moved into the palace recently. Why? There’s a vague sense that something bad is happening – maybe a war? – but it’s not actually explained. They just move into the palace. Apparently, being a ‘Lady’ means Cat is a member of the Royal Family, which I’m not buying, but whatever.
This next sentence exemplifies Stauffer’s writing ability:
Gwenie had served as Cat’s nanny until her marriage to Sir Geophrey Luttrell (page 3).
Whose marriage? Gwenie’s or Catherine’s? (It’s Catherine, but we won’t find out for another nine pages).
There’s some boring description of what Gwenie looks like, as well as the butler, who is named Walter. Stouffer shifts abruptly from past perfect progressive to simple past tense, which is rather grating on the ear, as well as my mind, considering the scene is moving backwards in time.
Everyone prepares food and supplies for their escape. If they know the enemy is coming, why don’t they escape now and get more of a head start? This doesn’t make sense.
Walter wanders around and thinks about Catherine. Apparently they used to be childhood friends. He goes to her room and knocks on the door, hoping he’s not disturbing her sleep. There is no mention of why he’s knocking on the door. He hasn’t been summoned and he’s not bringing news. However, the subtext of his thoughts is that he’s attracted to her. So, in other words, Walter, a servant, is interrupting the rest of Catherine, a lady, because he has the hots for her. Despite the fact that Catherine is not only married, but is completely exhausted from a combination of working all day and being nine months pregnant.
Walter is a prick.
He goes inside and Catherine is crying. He pushes her hair back from her face, which is pretty inappropriate, and hugs her, and she gives him a note that she just received.
He pulled the letter from her delicate fingers while he continued to hold onto her tightly, so tightly he could feel the babies moving in her belly against his chest as he unfolded the parchment, and began to read it: (page 11).
That is a terribly constructed run-on sentence. Also, I’m pretty sure it’s physically impossible to feel two separate babies moving around, because you would never be able to tell if it was two of them you were feeling or just one. Also, if her belly is against his chest, that means his face is pressed against her boobs, and that is just an extremely inappropriate image for this book.
The letter says that Catherine’s husband is dead:
Tears streaming down her face, her body trembling with grief. [snip] Lady Catherine’s eyes appeared to be staring into thin air (page 10).
She cries and Walter hugs her and eventually they fall asleep (although Walter removes himself from the bed). That night Catherine goes into labor. Stouffer gives us a few unnecessary quotation marks, although she doesn’t have anything on Gloria Tesch. Anyway, the kids are born. Boys. Hooray!
A few days later they’re at dinner and Walter helps Lady Catherine sit down, because he’s the butler and that’s what he does. Then she turns around and almost nuzzles him and asks him to sit down at the table with him. Wait, what the fuck? Your husband just died a few days ago! What the hell are you doing flirting with your butler already? I mean, this would be one thing if Cat was portrayed as not caring about her husband, but she was practically in a state of shock and now this?
“Why, you handsome diplomat! I didn’t know you could be so wicked,” she said.
Walter just couldn’t help himself. He responded, “I’m flattered that you noticed.”
“Noticed what, Sir, that you are handsome, or wicked?” she chided back.
He swung her around in front of him, and looked right into her eyes, “Either way, Madame, I win, and that is what is important to a man at a time like this,” he said in a sassy manner.
They both began to laugh aloud. “Touché, you handsome devil,” Cat responded as they entered the room (page 24).
That is some of the most awkwardly written flirting I have ever had the misfortune to read. Also, 9-12 year olds!
Stouffer moves on to spending several pages talking about furniture and portraits and describing the ballroom in nauseating detail. Any children whose parents have doggedly continued reading have now begun to cry hysterically and beg for the sweet release of death.
Some people play music and they dance and flirt and exchange more horrid dialogue and no one seems to notice or care that a butler is sexing it up on the dance floor with a member of the Royal Family. And the idiotic quotes continue:
“If that makes me wicked…so be it!” she said with a poor attempt at a Shakespearean delivery (page 30).
Needless to say, there was nothing Shakespearean about what Cat just said. But more interesting is the revelation that we are in a world where Shakespeare exists, our world. Which makes me wonder where this country is, precisely, and how the rest of the world is reacting to the nuclear holocaust that is ravaging the world. Of course, they aren’t, because Stauffer doesn’t think these things through.
Anyway, their disrespect of Catherine’s dead husband doesn’t last because the bombs start dropping. They run to fetch the babies and go down to the secret passageway and hide underground. Bombs fall for three days and nights. They hear guns afterwards. One day Catherine makes up her mind. She’s had Walter build her a raft and leave it by the secret tunnel exit that comes out at some water. So Catherine waits until Walter is asleep and goes along the secret passageway by herself and gets to the end and wraps her sons in a quilt and puts them on the raft with a note inside a jewel box and pushes them out into the water.
I’ve never understood this, and that is mostly because this is moronic. Catherine’s reasoning is she wants to protect her sons from the nuclear fallout. Except the nuclear fallout is everywhere and you’re putting your sons out into the middle of it. Not to mention that there’s the far more pressing danger of dying of hunger, thirst, exposure, rolling off the raft, the raft sinking, being eaten by sharks, being eaten by seagulls, or any one of a thousand dangers. These babies are a week and a half old. It is not going to take a lot to kill them. She is essentially sentencing them to death, so I think what is actually going on here is Catherine is sick of the children and interesting in sexing up the butler, so she decides to murder them by setting them adrift.
Anyway, that’s the end of chapter one. And I hoped you enjoyed forty-three pages of boring exposition, backstory, description, and characterization for all of these idiots, because we’re never going to see them again. Yes. The author spent one-sixth of this book on unimportant information that is irrelevant to the plot and could have just as easily been summarized in a single page.
Leliel on 17 October 2010, 05:07 said:
Wait, every page have those margins?! I guess that explains how the “book” (and I use the term very loosely) is 1/6 over already. Not that Muggle™ seems to have appeared yet but I almost expect to see the trademark symbol every time one of “her” words appears in the story.
I certainly expect the current Willy the Wizard lawsuit to go as well as this one must have XD
WarriorsGate on 17 October 2010, 05:37 said:
So now, every time I use the word “elder” or talk about former British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, I have to pay Nancy Stauffer?
Also, naming an international union “COUP” is just asking for it.
Liz on 17 October 2010, 06:29 said:
What, this was so unnecessary. I thought Cat was the main character but it seems like it’s going to be the twins? T_T
TakuGifian on 17 October 2010, 09:22 said:
I guess there’s a reason that she was (a) self-published, and (b) virtually unheard of before the lawsuit. This is not only bad writing from a technical and artistic perspective, it’s also highly inappropriate for the target audience. On top of that, it’s also boring. It opens with a tired cliché of badly-worded background infodrop that reads like a first-draft encyclopaedia entry, it seems to have almost no action (as in, characters actually doing stuff, not just ‘action’ as in kung fu fights and car bombs), the first chapter is pointless set-up of the “starting far too early” variety, and there’s nothing about the plot or characters so far that jumps out at me as even mildly interesting.
And wouldn’t the Congress of United Peoples be shortened to the acronym CUP? Words like “of”, “and” and “the” are often omitted from acronyms. Take for example the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. They don’t call themselves RSFTPOCTA, they call themselves RSPCA. The C.o.U.P. seems like a situation where the “of” would be left out of the acronym.
Did Stouffer illustrate this herself as well?
bs_08 on 17 October 2010, 15:25 said:
he could feel the babies squishing around inside of her? wow.
swenson on 17 October 2010, 15:50 said:
This is alternately boring and disturbing. The babies moving bit is just… creepy.
Brink on 17 October 2010, 16:45 said:
Oh wow. I applaud you for keeping your sanity.
I don’t know how you handle it, but I love the Maradonia sporks as well.
Danielle on 17 October 2010, 17:31 said:
Wow.
I don’t know how you handle horrible books like this. I know I’d give up halfway through the prologue.
And why would she copyright word vomit like that? All the Nevils and Winklers and whatnots. Why doesn’t she just keep random words like that to herself and make people think she still has an inkling of sanity left?
AND WHAT THE HECK IS A NEDDIE SPOONER OF THE DEEP?!
Danielle on 17 October 2010, 17:50 said:
Okay, I just went onto Amazon and read some customer reviews. Toward the last page, I found the book’s only five-star review, and it is a thing of beauty. I won’t even spork it for fear of marring its glory:
Whether this reviewer is a sock puppet of the author or a brilliant troll (which seems plausible, considering they got the author’s first initial wrong), I must thank them for bringing tears of laughter to my eyes.
Rorschach on 17 October 2010, 18:11 said:
Yes.
Yes.
You find out in the next chapter. Sort of.
TakuGifian on 17 October 2010, 19:20 said:
Well, that’s one way of putting it. No matter who dropped it, crap is still crap.
Casey on 17 October 2010, 21:34 said:
Wow! This is the strangest thing, because I was browsing the book section of Amazon the other day and happened across this book. Weird.
Also, I know this is off-topic, but I came acros this website about three months ago and it quickly made it into my favorites. I think my writing has already improved! This site is interesting and very helpful! Thank you!
Kytescall on 17 October 2010, 23:47 said:
That one page has… four and a half sentences. WTF is she thinking?
ProserpinaFC on 18 October 2010, 08:41 said:
I found this book in my library one day, when I was 18.
I took it out.
I read the first three chapters.
I then flung it through my library’s window.
I found a website sporking it and read that instead.
dragonarya on 18 October 2010, 09:14 said:
This is hilarious. I was giggling the whole time. At the very least, there’s no excessive quotation like Tesch.
swenson on 21 October 2010, 10:41 said:
I just noticed something. Did she seriously try to trademark “Elders”?! That’s a basic word in the English language! You can’t trademark common words!
(or, rather, you can, but only if the word is used in a way that has no relation to the actual product. For example, the company name “Apple” is trademarked, but it doesn’t mean the common word “apple” is trademarked. It’s called an arbitrary mark, apparently. Doesn’t excuse pretending she trademarked “Elders” though. And, for the record, I did a trademark search and only could find her registering “Muggle” and “Muggles”, and both of those have been abandoned trademarks since September 2010 and March 2009, respectively.)
SweetRunningBreeze on 24 October 2010, 13:46 said:
Oh Walter, saying words in a sassy manner. What a creep.
This is hilarious.
Prince o' Tea on 4 April 2011, 09:42 said:
Trying to bang the help, five minutes after her husband croaks? This woman is a complete slut, I’m surprised she’s only had two babies so far.
Unless…
This may not even be the first time she’s put her babies on a raft out to sea…
Prince O'Tea on 22 September 2012, 12:13 said:
The glorious thing about books like Maradonia and Legend of Rah, is that if you ever reread them, you may just notice something hilariously idiotic that you overlooked before.
I didn’t notice she tried to trademark: “winkle”. “Winkle” and “winky” is an euphemism for the male genitalia, that only seems to be used by strange old women (such as Nursie from Blackadder, and one of my mother’s friends.)
Sian on 17 March 2013, 15:27 said:
Wow…whilst I agree totally that this novel (if one can call it such) is a work of bollocks, a much less biased report could have served in place of this one so as to allow readers to give it a chance…
Tim on 17 March 2013, 15:34 said:
Yeah, because everyone is forced to read this page at gunpoint first, rite?
Alicia on 28 May 2013, 00:07 said:
What is a ‘non-biased’ sporking?
BillyBilly on 2 September 2022, 10:25 said:
Walter is on that king shit