Rating: 
Summary: A journey through time and magic, but not space
Review: Alan Moore has provided us with an excellent novel filled with magic theory and bloody history. Any lover of fantasy who prefers magic to be kept on the mysterious and unknowable side will appreciate this novel.
Rating: 
Summary: Excellent, but a little too out there
Review: Alan Moore is one of my favorite writers, period. In Voice of the Fire, though, he's off experimenting before the literati can become comfortable with who he is as a writer. And I wouldn't have it any other way.This book is basically what would have happened if Alan had begun his career with "From Hell". A truly masterful piece of work, but so far is it from the norm that a lot of people aren't ever going to hear of it, more won't buy, more won't understand it, and more won't care. As a third novel, Voice of the Fire works great. As a first, it's far too warped an introduction to Moore's prose. Voice of the Fire begins in language that is devilishly clever in its usage, but it unfortunately makes the reading for an unmotivated person somewhat arduous, even impossible. But that's the whole point. It's as much a history as language as it is the history of Northampton. Though all of the characters (save the author himself) meet fairly unpleasant ends, they are richly drawn and historically engaging.
Rating:
Summary: Alan Moore best work ever.
Review: Here he lets loose with all the skill he has and the result is a tour de force. It reminds you Iain Sinclair or Peter Ackroyd in his relentless exploration of deep time.
The usual thing to say is that this one is not for the kids but it has the wise eyes that real children hold to life, wide open both to the horrible and the wonderful.
So maybe this one is not for the kins, but surely is for the ages.
Rating:
Summary: This book is a work of magic
Review: I think that Rebecca Scott explains the book best in her greenmanreview.com review. Here is an excerpt: "If Voice of the Fire has a protagonist, it must be Northampton itself, because this is the story of the formation of the mythology of that place. It is a geological study of the strata of the collective unconscious of the area. Each of its twelve chapters is the first-person story of an individual who crystallized into the forming stones in the hill of tales, whose bodies fed its grass and trees. Their histories wind through that of the land, bringing us closer and closer to the present day. Each of the chapters includes a full-color plate, a photographic character portrait by Jose Villarrubia (who contributed to the very fine graphic novel Veils). These glow softly, and have a painterly quality about them that makes even the grimmest a gem. Yet this is a text novel, not a graphic novel, and the words are the things. Very fine words they are, too: "Trust in the fictive process, in the occult interweaving of text and event must be unwavering and absolute. This is the magic place, the mad place at the spark gap between word and world." The language is vivid, graphic (sometimes too graphic for someone who reads while eating). Each chapter, each story, has a distinct voice, radically different from the others... This book is a work of magic ... If you let it, it will work a change in your consciousness ... So come, climb this hill of tales in the night of myth, draw close to the flames, listen to the voice of the fire, and let it work its spell in you." -- Rebecca Scott, GreenManReview.com
Rating:
Summary: This book is a work of magic
Review: I think that Rebecca Scott explains the book best in her greenmanreview.com review. Here is an excerpt: "If Voice of the Fire has a protagonist, it must be Northampton itself, because this is the story of the formation of the mythology of that place. It is a geological study of the strata of the collective unconscious of the area. Each of its twelve chapters is the first-person story of an individual who crystallized into the forming stones in the hill of tales, whose bodies fed its grass and trees. Their histories wind through that of the land, bringing us closer and closer to the present day. Each of the chapters includes a full-color plate, a photographic character portrait by Jose Villarrubia (who contributed to the very fine graphic novel Veils). These glow softly, and have a painterly quality about them that makes even the grimmest a gem. Yet this is a text novel, not a graphic novel, and the words are the things. Very fine words they are, too: "Trust in the fictive process, in the occult interweaving of text and event must be unwavering and absolute. This is the magic place, the mad place at the spark gap between word and world." The language is vivid, graphic (sometimes too graphic for someone who reads while eating). Each chapter, each story, has a distinct voice, radically different from the others... This book is a work of magic ... If you let it, it will work a change in your consciousness ... So come, climb this hill of tales in the night of myth, draw close to the flames, listen to the voice of the fire, and let it work its spell in you." -- Rebecca Scott, GreenManReview.com
Rating:
Summary: You have to buy the book!
Review: I want this book to be very successful for Alan to understand that he can be as big a writer as a grafical one. After all, Gaiman became big in writing - why not Moore! Actually, I blame on him an unhealthy passion to books with garish pics which found me in an ripe age of 34. It was him to showed to me that clever ideas can be communicated in any form - now it he who gets to get this lesson:)
But as for his first (as far as I know) experience in "conventional" - in sence that it does have no pics - writing, Moore easily outdone a vast majority of "clever" writers. God bless you, Alan, but now it's time to go commercial!
Rating: 
Summary: Rambling, Pointless, Unfocused, Obscure, and Disappointing
Review: I'm a tremendous admirer of Alan Moore's work - but I didn't care much for this unfocused collection of stories pretending to be a novel. If you care for a "artistic", pretentious definition of a novel as a collection of stories related only by virtue of being set in the same place, then VOICE OF THE FIRE is indeed a novel. That also means that every series of stories set in one location also is a novel. All of the Sherlock Holmes, stories, of course, are a single novel - at least, the ones set in 221B Baker Street. Very daring, very radical - and very, very stupid. Judged purely as stories, many episodes in VOICE OF THE FIRE are admirable, even excellent - while some are merely trivial and pointless. BUT THIS AIN'T A NOVEL, FOLKS. Don't let the author & publisher sell you a bill of goods! Moore seems to think that by virtue of setting all his pieces in various periods of one locality, a novel will somehow shape itself out of this linguistic and narrative chaos by magic. Well, sorry, but VOICE OF THE FIRE ain't Penn & Teller. It's the worst birthday magic clown you ever were embarrassed by as a child: full of fumbled props and misfired patter. This clown keeps pulling black mystical dogs from another dimension, severed heads and legs and multiple burnings out of his hat instead of bunnies. And don't even ask about his balloon animals! If marketed as a collection of stories, with that fumbling, rambling, if-only-I-had-some-real-point-to-make, truly imbecilic "Phipps' Fire Escape" chapter excised, one could honestly recommend VOICE OF THE FIRE. Here's a fair sample of that chapter: "Wine and passionflower and other substances of earth. Shapes painted with contorted fingers on to empty space. Deranged, of course, but then derangement is the point. Speak the desire in terms both lucid and transparent. Wite it down lest it should be forgotten when the spasm hits. Deep in the stomach now the tingling approach of horrid ecstasies. A naming and a calling, and then silence. Failure. Nothing happening, and then the rush of other. Sudden heat loss and convulsion. Hurried, white-faced navigation of a loft-ladder becomes an Escher staircase, only managing to reach the strip-lit ultra-violet of the bathroom as the venom surges up to spill into the yawning porcelain." Oh, spare me! That sort of writing comes across like the vapid ramblings of a classroom full of self-important Freshman Comp geeks! Do you really need all that overblown verbiage simply to say that the confusion you feel leads you to "talk to the toilet"? Still, if this kind of writing is your cup of tea, go for it! As for me, I'd rather reread Moore's PROMETHEA, LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN, FROM HELL, WATCHMEN or his SWAMP THING issues. At least in those Moore had something to say - and managed to say it coherently.
Rating:
Summary: Perhaps Moore's weakest work ever
Review: I've been reading Moore's comics writing for 15 years, and sought out a copy of this book based on its intriguing premise: A look at the darker history of the world over 5000 years from a single place in England. Unfortunately, the book is all style and almost no substance. There's the "mangled English" chapter, the "no punctuation" chapter, the "told by a dead man" chapter, and everything is told in first person present tense. The final chapter introduces another hoary and annoying literary trick, and none of these tricks are in the least interesting. They just make the book harder to read. The book itself is a collection of tenuously linked short stories, usually involving characters who come to bad ends. The story suggests an obsession with sex and death, and it often does its best to get in as many erotic and/or scatalogical references as it can. There's no overall plot or even theme to the stories, and at one point the text itself suggests that anyone looking for meaning or redemption is going to be disappointed. And disappointing it is. Other than the clever second chapter about a woman who impersonates a woman she murdered to gain a dying shaman's riches, Voice of the Fire is a struggle to get through all the way. Even if you find a copy of this book, I wouldn't bother with it. I was bitterly disappointed with it.
Rating:
Summary: Perhaps Moore's weakest work ever
Review: I've been reading Moore's comics writing for 15 years, and sought out a copy of this book based on its intriguing premise: A look at the darker history of the world over 5000 years from a single place in England. Unfortunately, the book is all style and almost no substance. There's the "mangled English" chapter, the "no punctuation" chapter, the "told by a dead man" chapter, and everything is told in first person present tense. The final chapter introduces another hoary and annoying literary trick, and none of these tricks are in the least interesting. They just make the book harder to read. The book itself is a collection of tenuously linked short stories, usually involving characters who come to bad ends. The story suggests an obsession with sex and death, and it often does its best to get in as many erotic and/or scatalogical references as it can. There's no overall plot or even theme to the stories, and at one point the text itself suggests that anyone looking for meaning or redemption is going to be disappointed. And disappointing it is. Other than the clever second chapter about a woman who impersonates a woman she murdered to gain a dying shaman's riches, Voice of the Fire is a struggle to get through all the way. Even if you find a copy of this book, I wouldn't bother with it. I was bitterly disappointed with it.
Rating:
Summary: This book blew my mind
Review: If you like would like to see some of the most devilish things that the historic residents of Northampton have got up to over the years read this book. The last chapter will really turn the screw.
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