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ATTILA THE PUN: A Magic Moscow Story by Daniel Pinkwater

ATTILA THE PUN: A Magic Moscow Story

By

Pub Date: Oct. 5th, 1981
Publisher: Four Winds

This companion to last year's Magic Moscow is one of Pinkwater's trifles, not as far-out funny as its predecessor and thinner altogether, but a little better than its title and still containing enough throwaway laugh lines to uphold the joke-butt status of Hoboken, New Jersey--where a real comic-book collector named Steve actually does run a soft-ice-cream parlor called the Magic something-or-other and dispenses health-junk combinations almost as bizarre as the Nuclear Meltdown featured here. It's one of the regular Meltdown buyers, a fake ""mystic seer"" named Lamont Penumbra, who sets the action (such as it is) in motion in his loft above Hoboken's Parthenon Puerto Rican Restaurant. Armed with some old magic books acquired by Steve, and using Steve's kid helper Norman Bleistift (the narrator) as a go-between, Lamont sets out to summon ""a famous person from the past"" and gets Attila the Hun's less famous brother Attila the Pun. The problem then is what to do with this stomping, singing, sword-whacking, never-sleeping, and endlessly pun-cracking ghost--and the solution, dreamed up by Norman and following close on the heels of the problem's formulation, is to make him night watchman and Friday night comic at the Magic Moscow. ""It turns out that fifth-century Hun humor really goes over well in Hoboken,"" and Attila's act becomes the biggest show in town. Readers are treated to a sampling, and no doubt kids will take more enthusiastically than reviewers to Attila's puns.