Book: "Toothless", by J.P. Moore
Redeemed from worms and wasting clay,
This chance is theirs: to be of use.
Back before Christmas, I received a publisher's e-mail with a picture of the cover of their latest book. It was a disturbing painting of a reanimated dead guy in the mail and surcoat of a Knight Templar, with his lower jaw missing. He looked upset about it. I like stories with a zombie protagonist, and stories about people who are missing a body part or key ability, and historical epics with swordplay and matters of honor. This promised to hit all of my favorite buttons.
It did. I read the first two chapters, made available here, and fell in love with the book. It's already been published, and I'll be getting a paper copy eventually, but what surprised me was that it had started out as podfic. The author had recorded each chapter and made it free on the internet in early-to-mid 2009. (Apparently broadcasting each chapter after finishing it. Very like Victorian serial novels, now I think of it.) I can't afford to buy books at the moment, so I nervously sat down and listened to the podcast version. It was excellent; I got hooked and finished the whole thing in about ten late-evening listening sessions. The audio version is here. The first chapter is characteristic and will tell you if it's your sort of thing. If you're moved to listen to any of it, I hope you'll tell me what you thought.
Briefly, then, it's the zombie apocalypse in the year 1180. An army of corpses and demons has swept from Scandinavia down through Europe and is making its way across France. They're the army of the Black Yew, which is exactly what it says on the tin: a giant, evil tree, being hauled across the country on a giant cart pulled by cave-trolls huge, inhuman slave-creatures. Because of its familiarity and its malignity, the Black Yew is actually scary. "Unheimlich", my teacher Tannat would say. It's spot-on awful, one of the few recent attempts at writing a Lovecraftian abomination as lead villain that actually works for me. Also, it's one of those powerful but ultimately aimless villains--and that's all to the good. Cthulu wants to arise and devour, the Black Yew wants to consume the whole world. It has no particular plans after that, but, hey, you don't need it to, because it's somewhere between a tree and a disease. It's all the scarier because you can't really reason with it. (Eventually, a few of its minions even start asking themselves what they're going to do next if the Yew kills off everything.) By analogy, you can't reason with the Black Plague either. I've been reading a lot about epidemics lately, and they seem almost like intelligent entities; they know enough to spread themselves among humans but don't know enough to refrain from killing so many of their hosts that they die too. The 1918 influenza epidemic blew itself out apparently by killing off enough of its favored victims that it could no longer travel and feed on new ones.
Anyhow, we learn all this in tantalizing hints and implications during the opening, which is a doozy. The book actually begins with the protagonist, Martin, bleeding out after his defeat in a battle with the Yew's army, and remembering his past life and the beginnings of the war with the Yew while he waits for death to claim him. Meanwhile, however, the bad guys drag him off the battlefield and take him to the Big Bad to be reanimated. I'd only do it an injustice by summarizing the scene; read it for yourself at the excerpt above. Suffice it to say that he passes through death and rises as a minion of the forces of evil, who rename him Toothless. (The Black Yew and its henchdemons have a thing for literal names. Toothless is one of a batch of undead who include Breakneck and Curdle.) His soul and his conscience are almost completely removed, but he's still a soldier--he used to be one of the Knights Templar, in fact, before that all went south--and useful because he remembers his fighting skills.
Toothless's time as an officer/shock trooper for the undead army is by far the most original part of the book. I could not get enough of it. Moore has a way with morbid images, and he's very good at coming up with a supernatural horror concept and then following it through to its logical conclusion in a way that lends reality to some very loony concepts. You find yourself saying, "Of course it would be that way." Case in point: there are two kinds of zombie. Shamblers, the most common, are exactly what it sounds like, pathetic animated undead with no apparent personality. The ones we get to know, sentients, are undead fighters with some measure of free-will and some memories of being living men.
They almost all have obvious signs of death about them, though: pallor, rot, missing body parts. Toothless's jaw is gone, Breakneck's head is bent over on his shoulder, Curdle was killed by third-degree burns and looks, well, curdled. When they're joined by another free-willed undead who's better preserved and able to pass for human, our guys resent him like a bunch of unpublished writers would a published one. (Er. Or so I imagine.) All the dead revel in their memories of being alive, yearn for the state, and fear loss of personality as a shambler or final death in battle.
Turns out there are two very human things you can still do as a sentient: sleep and drink ale. Sleep frees up your memories and makes you more human; ale induces a blissful, quasi-living state. (Only ale will do. Wine or whiskey don't really work the same way, because ale has a special kind of living magic that counteracts zombieness.) The superior officer finds it useful to keep Toothless and his kind as human as possible, and after they fight well they're rewarded with ale. In a peaceful, almost lighthearted scene that's a welcome change from the carnage, Toothless, Breakneck, and Curdle sit up all night drinking ale together in the cellar of an inn. They chase their memories and enjoy feeling alive again. By morning, they've drunk two-thirds of a barrel and it's all flowed through them, so they're sitting up to their waists in used ale. See what I mean about morbid logic? It's not even that disgusting in the context of the book, because our guys see and do a lot of stuff that's far more nasty. (You can never buy beer, only rent it.) Later in the book, we see their captain, an ancient Roman skeleton called Longinus, taking a drink. It's even worse for him. You know that joke about the skeleton who walks into a bar and asks for a beer and a mop? That's Longinus.
Toothless and the other two sentients make a good team. You've seen the types before. Toothless himself is the silent, brooding leader with the grim backstory and the fighting skills. Breakneck is the big, cheerful killer with the crude sense of humor and Curdle is a pensive, intelligent soul who's not really cut out to be an undead trooper. Both he and Breakneck have a gift for guessing what Toothless is thinking, which is a good thing all round because Toothless can't talk.
--Here I should mention that one of the joys of the book is seeing Moore work within that specific limitation. He starts out with a voiceless protagonist, and keeps him that way to the end. You would expect to have a psychic character turn up, or some dodge like that. To be fair, one of the human characters does have uncanny abilities, but that doesn't include reading Toothless's mind. He only talks in the flashbacks where he's human; in the present he's always forced to rely on gesture and expression. (Nod; headshake; shrug; point in a direction; roll eyes in exasperation; crinkle eyes slightly in sort-of-a-smile.) It even becomes a running gag that people keep offering Toothless the means to write while at the same time making him unable to use it for himself. At one point he only has the space to draw a crude map when he needs to direct someone; at another point, the undead army make him write down a number; later still, a minor villain offers him ink and a sheet of parchment, but won't unchain his hands to let him write. Still, it never gets annoying or contrived; the plot would be different if he could talk, but it's never hindered because he can't.
Anyhow, Toothless, Breakneck and Curdle make such a good team that I wanted to go through the entire book with them, but it was not to be. Toothless only stays with the undead army for the first third of the book. The rest of the plot was weird, well-written, and almost entirely excellent, but I couldn't get into it for a while because I was going, "Damn it, I want to be back with the zombie army!" Have you ever had that happen, where you get so attached to the early scenes that you can't let go of them when the story takes a different turn? I've written that kind of plot myself, and read it out loud to friends and family members. And I've listened in frustration as they tell me, "Why do we have to follow so-and-so? This should all be more like the party scene at the beginning! That was FUN!"
Once I quit wanting to tell the plot how to develop, though, I came to enjoy it for itself. The middle third of the book deals with Toothless going AWOL from the Army of the Yew, running off in an apparent crisis of conscience, and meeting a teenaged girl named Lil who's in trouble. Lil is an odd case. She's a "seer"--she can predict the future, though unreliably, and her skull is deformed. All this makes her an easy target for witch hysteria. True to form, the remaining humans in France are acting out their fear of the actual undead menace by picking on their fellow living humans. Lil herself has been sent out to the edge of the plaguelands with a mission from the Knights Templar: "Find Martin and bring him home." It's a good thing all round, therefore, that Martin-now-Toothless finds her first. What she does not foresee is his being an undead abomination with no voice.
The two of them eventually bond. Think Frankenstein's Monster and little Maria, except that he's able to stop short of killing her. She's his morality pet, as TV Tropes would say. He's her responsiblity, too. All she knows is that she can help the good guys by taking him to the appointed place. He carries her piggyback at inhuman speed across much of France, and they wind up going on not one but two dungeon crawls. He saves her life; later she saves his... er, undeath. I liked Lil, even though I still missed Toothless's POV. It's a girl and her zombie, all for one and one for all. When I was fifteen years old, I would have loved to have an undead warrior as my friend/caretaker/pet. I'd have preferred Toothless's company to that of a dragon, a unicorn, or my very own pony.
The last third of the book is the weakest overall. Toothless eventually winds up fighting for the forces of Good, in this case the Templars, who set out on a crusade against the forces of the Yew. The forces of Good seem pretty gullible, in contrast to the bad guys whom we met earlier. Chiefly, they're way too ready to trust Toothless to be on their side. We, the audience, are told his thoughts and know that he's struggling to stay human and not slay the living. Meanwhile, the Knights Templar are welcoming this reanimated corpse back into the fold as "Brother Martin", trusting him not to kill them. In its way, it was touching; but to this audience member, after she'd thought about it a moment, it made the good guys look criminally stupid. There's a gratuitous scene with a torturer; there's a shipboard battle that came out of nowhere and could have been cut with no loss to the story; loads of new characters are introduced, just too late in the story for me to get attached to them in anything like the way I'm attached to Toothless and even Lil. (The Templar Master, Odo, is a real person, I was delighted to discover. In real life, he died as a prisoner of Saladin, I think it was. No word on whether the real character was as much of a tool as the character in Toothless.)
Even with these criticisms, there are images in the Templar Army sequence that haunted me. A corpse wrapped in white linen and cold as the clay, who nevertheless stirs restlessly on his bed and turns his head towards the field of battle. A werewolf infectee who destroys himself in front of his friends. A messenger dove which flutters down out of the sky and lands on the gigantic severed head of a demon. And the last chapter is full of win; characters and plot threads reappear from the first scenes and are drawn together in a very satisfying payoff. The ending's a tearjerker, but in the best possible way.
My only real beef with the book was that I was expecting monster guilt, and didn't get it. What I mean by "monster guilt" is the moment at which a protagonist realizes they're a monster in an overwhelming attack of perspective, develops a conscience, and feels really lousy about having killed people. You see this in a lot of monster narratives. I'm very fond of the trope. Well, I thought we'd get something like that here. Toothless spends his career in the Army of the Yew killing living humans. Men, women, and all ages of children. In one sequence he and another zombie slaughter all the young children in a town full of noncombatants. You will want to go and wash your brain after reading this scene. How much of this is Toothless's own decision and how much is a direct compulsion from the Big Bad is not entirely clear, so it's hard to take for the reader who's been getting to like Toothless. Then something happens (plot point) that makes him hesitate and brings back his conscience full force for a moment. Aha, I thought. Now we'll see him thinking "Oh God, what have I become?!" We'll see him realize that he used to be a human being with honor and now he's let himself become a monster.
Boy, was I wrong. In fact, what happens is this: the characters get distracted, there's a big fight scene where Toothless has to look out for his own safety instead of considering his moral choices, and lots of plot stuff crops up to divert our interest. Then we switch viewpoint characters, and the next time we see Toothless, we're not in his head anymore and can't tell what he's thinking. He's evidently had a change of heart about killing people, but we never get to see it. I wanted to see him realize his own guilt. That was a massive debt of karma that he racked up with all the kills, earlier on; I waited for chapters for a payoff and never got it. It's the literary equivalent of stepping on a stair that isn't there. It was frustrating, even for me (I'm the reigning queen of Taking Fiction Too Seriously).
But these objections don't spoil the book for me by any means. For one thing, I'm going to buy the print edition eventually, and for all I know the author will have addressed these issues himself. He wrote and podcast it as a serial, which would mean that he couldn't go back at the time and change things he'd already recorded. For another thing, I love the book as it is. The storytelling is strong enough, and the mysteries of the plot are compelling enough, that you always want to keep reading to find out what happens. That's what we all look for in a good book, but it's not that common.
Also, I can recommend the audiobook version because J.P. Moore is an excellent reader aloud. He's got an attractive, emotive voice, expressive without being hammy, and he does the different voices of the characters in a way that won me over completely. Reading aloud is an underappreciated art form; I feel myself to be a good judge of readers because of all the time I spent as a child with my parents reading aloud, but I haven't really thought about beyond that context till now. A++ would listen again. Putting on a chapter of Toothless before I went to sleep at night was a lovely experience--much like being little and listening to my mother tell me a fairy tale before bed. Now that I've finished the book I miss it. Hm. I'll have to see if I can find an audiobook read by Christopher Lee for my next bedtime book. And sometime I'm sure I'll go back and listen through Toothless all over again.
This chance is theirs: to be of use.
Back before Christmas, I received a publisher's e-mail with a picture of the cover of their latest book. It was a disturbing painting of a reanimated dead guy in the mail and surcoat of a Knight Templar, with his lower jaw missing. He looked upset about it. I like stories with a zombie protagonist, and stories about people who are missing a body part or key ability, and historical epics with swordplay and matters of honor. This promised to hit all of my favorite buttons.
It did. I read the first two chapters, made available here, and fell in love with the book. It's already been published, and I'll be getting a paper copy eventually, but what surprised me was that it had started out as podfic. The author had recorded each chapter and made it free on the internet in early-to-mid 2009. (Apparently broadcasting each chapter after finishing it. Very like Victorian serial novels, now I think of it.) I can't afford to buy books at the moment, so I nervously sat down and listened to the podcast version. It was excellent; I got hooked and finished the whole thing in about ten late-evening listening sessions. The audio version is here. The first chapter is characteristic and will tell you if it's your sort of thing. If you're moved to listen to any of it, I hope you'll tell me what you thought.
Briefly, then, it's the zombie apocalypse in the year 1180. An army of corpses and demons has swept from Scandinavia down through Europe and is making its way across France. They're the army of the Black Yew, which is exactly what it says on the tin: a giant, evil tree, being hauled across the country on a giant cart pulled by cave-trolls huge, inhuman slave-creatures. Because of its familiarity and its malignity, the Black Yew is actually scary. "Unheimlich", my teacher Tannat would say. It's spot-on awful, one of the few recent attempts at writing a Lovecraftian abomination as lead villain that actually works for me. Also, it's one of those powerful but ultimately aimless villains--and that's all to the good. Cthulu wants to arise and devour, the Black Yew wants to consume the whole world. It has no particular plans after that, but, hey, you don't need it to, because it's somewhere between a tree and a disease. It's all the scarier because you can't really reason with it. (Eventually, a few of its minions even start asking themselves what they're going to do next if the Yew kills off everything.) By analogy, you can't reason with the Black Plague either. I've been reading a lot about epidemics lately, and they seem almost like intelligent entities; they know enough to spread themselves among humans but don't know enough to refrain from killing so many of their hosts that they die too. The 1918 influenza epidemic blew itself out apparently by killing off enough of its favored victims that it could no longer travel and feed on new ones.
Anyhow, we learn all this in tantalizing hints and implications during the opening, which is a doozy. The book actually begins with the protagonist, Martin, bleeding out after his defeat in a battle with the Yew's army, and remembering his past life and the beginnings of the war with the Yew while he waits for death to claim him. Meanwhile, however, the bad guys drag him off the battlefield and take him to the Big Bad to be reanimated. I'd only do it an injustice by summarizing the scene; read it for yourself at the excerpt above. Suffice it to say that he passes through death and rises as a minion of the forces of evil, who rename him Toothless. (The Black Yew and its henchdemons have a thing for literal names. Toothless is one of a batch of undead who include Breakneck and Curdle.) His soul and his conscience are almost completely removed, but he's still a soldier--he used to be one of the Knights Templar, in fact, before that all went south--and useful because he remembers his fighting skills.
Toothless's time as an officer/shock trooper for the undead army is by far the most original part of the book. I could not get enough of it. Moore has a way with morbid images, and he's very good at coming up with a supernatural horror concept and then following it through to its logical conclusion in a way that lends reality to some very loony concepts. You find yourself saying, "Of course it would be that way." Case in point: there are two kinds of zombie. Shamblers, the most common, are exactly what it sounds like, pathetic animated undead with no apparent personality. The ones we get to know, sentients, are undead fighters with some measure of free-will and some memories of being living men.
They almost all have obvious signs of death about them, though: pallor, rot, missing body parts. Toothless's jaw is gone, Breakneck's head is bent over on his shoulder, Curdle was killed by third-degree burns and looks, well, curdled. When they're joined by another free-willed undead who's better preserved and able to pass for human, our guys resent him like a bunch of unpublished writers would a published one. (Er. Or so I imagine.) All the dead revel in their memories of being alive, yearn for the state, and fear loss of personality as a shambler or final death in battle.
Turns out there are two very human things you can still do as a sentient: sleep and drink ale. Sleep frees up your memories and makes you more human; ale induces a blissful, quasi-living state. (Only ale will do. Wine or whiskey don't really work the same way, because ale has a special kind of living magic that counteracts zombieness.) The superior officer finds it useful to keep Toothless and his kind as human as possible, and after they fight well they're rewarded with ale. In a peaceful, almost lighthearted scene that's a welcome change from the carnage, Toothless, Breakneck, and Curdle sit up all night drinking ale together in the cellar of an inn. They chase their memories and enjoy feeling alive again. By morning, they've drunk two-thirds of a barrel and it's all flowed through them, so they're sitting up to their waists in used ale. See what I mean about morbid logic? It's not even that disgusting in the context of the book, because our guys see and do a lot of stuff that's far more nasty. (You can never buy beer, only rent it.) Later in the book, we see their captain, an ancient Roman skeleton called Longinus, taking a drink. It's even worse for him. You know that joke about the skeleton who walks into a bar and asks for a beer and a mop? That's Longinus.
Toothless and the other two sentients make a good team. You've seen the types before. Toothless himself is the silent, brooding leader with the grim backstory and the fighting skills. Breakneck is the big, cheerful killer with the crude sense of humor and Curdle is a pensive, intelligent soul who's not really cut out to be an undead trooper. Both he and Breakneck have a gift for guessing what Toothless is thinking, which is a good thing all round because Toothless can't talk.
--Here I should mention that one of the joys of the book is seeing Moore work within that specific limitation. He starts out with a voiceless protagonist, and keeps him that way to the end. You would expect to have a psychic character turn up, or some dodge like that. To be fair, one of the human characters does have uncanny abilities, but that doesn't include reading Toothless's mind. He only talks in the flashbacks where he's human; in the present he's always forced to rely on gesture and expression. (Nod; headshake; shrug; point in a direction; roll eyes in exasperation; crinkle eyes slightly in sort-of-a-smile.) It even becomes a running gag that people keep offering Toothless the means to write while at the same time making him unable to use it for himself. At one point he only has the space to draw a crude map when he needs to direct someone; at another point, the undead army make him write down a number; later still, a minor villain offers him ink and a sheet of parchment, but won't unchain his hands to let him write. Still, it never gets annoying or contrived; the plot would be different if he could talk, but it's never hindered because he can't.
Anyhow, Toothless, Breakneck and Curdle make such a good team that I wanted to go through the entire book with them, but it was not to be. Toothless only stays with the undead army for the first third of the book. The rest of the plot was weird, well-written, and almost entirely excellent, but I couldn't get into it for a while because I was going, "Damn it, I want to be back with the zombie army!" Have you ever had that happen, where you get so attached to the early scenes that you can't let go of them when the story takes a different turn? I've written that kind of plot myself, and read it out loud to friends and family members. And I've listened in frustration as they tell me, "Why do we have to follow so-and-so? This should all be more like the party scene at the beginning! That was FUN!"
Once I quit wanting to tell the plot how to develop, though, I came to enjoy it for itself. The middle third of the book deals with Toothless going AWOL from the Army of the Yew, running off in an apparent crisis of conscience, and meeting a teenaged girl named Lil who's in trouble. Lil is an odd case. She's a "seer"--she can predict the future, though unreliably, and her skull is deformed. All this makes her an easy target for witch hysteria. True to form, the remaining humans in France are acting out their fear of the actual undead menace by picking on their fellow living humans. Lil herself has been sent out to the edge of the plaguelands with a mission from the Knights Templar: "Find Martin and bring him home." It's a good thing all round, therefore, that Martin-now-Toothless finds her first. What she does not foresee is his being an undead abomination with no voice.
The two of them eventually bond. Think Frankenstein's Monster and little Maria, except that he's able to stop short of killing her. She's his morality pet, as TV Tropes would say. He's her responsiblity, too. All she knows is that she can help the good guys by taking him to the appointed place. He carries her piggyback at inhuman speed across much of France, and they wind up going on not one but two dungeon crawls. He saves her life; later she saves his... er, undeath. I liked Lil, even though I still missed Toothless's POV. It's a girl and her zombie, all for one and one for all. When I was fifteen years old, I would have loved to have an undead warrior as my friend/caretaker/pet. I'd have preferred Toothless's company to that of a dragon, a unicorn, or my very own pony.
The last third of the book is the weakest overall. Toothless eventually winds up fighting for the forces of Good, in this case the Templars, who set out on a crusade against the forces of the Yew. The forces of Good seem pretty gullible, in contrast to the bad guys whom we met earlier. Chiefly, they're way too ready to trust Toothless to be on their side. We, the audience, are told his thoughts and know that he's struggling to stay human and not slay the living. Meanwhile, the Knights Templar are welcoming this reanimated corpse back into the fold as "Brother Martin", trusting him not to kill them. In its way, it was touching; but to this audience member, after she'd thought about it a moment, it made the good guys look criminally stupid. There's a gratuitous scene with a torturer; there's a shipboard battle that came out of nowhere and could have been cut with no loss to the story; loads of new characters are introduced, just too late in the story for me to get attached to them in anything like the way I'm attached to Toothless and even Lil. (The Templar Master, Odo, is a real person, I was delighted to discover. In real life, he died as a prisoner of Saladin, I think it was. No word on whether the real character was as much of a tool as the character in Toothless.)
Even with these criticisms, there are images in the Templar Army sequence that haunted me. A corpse wrapped in white linen and cold as the clay, who nevertheless stirs restlessly on his bed and turns his head towards the field of battle. A werewolf infectee who destroys himself in front of his friends. A messenger dove which flutters down out of the sky and lands on the gigantic severed head of a demon. And the last chapter is full of win; characters and plot threads reappear from the first scenes and are drawn together in a very satisfying payoff. The ending's a tearjerker, but in the best possible way.
My only real beef with the book was that I was expecting monster guilt, and didn't get it. What I mean by "monster guilt" is the moment at which a protagonist realizes they're a monster in an overwhelming attack of perspective, develops a conscience, and feels really lousy about having killed people. You see this in a lot of monster narratives. I'm very fond of the trope. Well, I thought we'd get something like that here. Toothless spends his career in the Army of the Yew killing living humans. Men, women, and all ages of children. In one sequence he and another zombie slaughter all the young children in a town full of noncombatants. You will want to go and wash your brain after reading this scene. How much of this is Toothless's own decision and how much is a direct compulsion from the Big Bad is not entirely clear, so it's hard to take for the reader who's been getting to like Toothless. Then something happens (plot point) that makes him hesitate and brings back his conscience full force for a moment. Aha, I thought. Now we'll see him thinking "Oh God, what have I become?!" We'll see him realize that he used to be a human being with honor and now he's let himself become a monster.
Boy, was I wrong. In fact, what happens is this: the characters get distracted, there's a big fight scene where Toothless has to look out for his own safety instead of considering his moral choices, and lots of plot stuff crops up to divert our interest. Then we switch viewpoint characters, and the next time we see Toothless, we're not in his head anymore and can't tell what he's thinking. He's evidently had a change of heart about killing people, but we never get to see it. I wanted to see him realize his own guilt. That was a massive debt of karma that he racked up with all the kills, earlier on; I waited for chapters for a payoff and never got it. It's the literary equivalent of stepping on a stair that isn't there. It was frustrating, even for me (I'm the reigning queen of Taking Fiction Too Seriously).
But these objections don't spoil the book for me by any means. For one thing, I'm going to buy the print edition eventually, and for all I know the author will have addressed these issues himself. He wrote and podcast it as a serial, which would mean that he couldn't go back at the time and change things he'd already recorded. For another thing, I love the book as it is. The storytelling is strong enough, and the mysteries of the plot are compelling enough, that you always want to keep reading to find out what happens. That's what we all look for in a good book, but it's not that common.
Also, I can recommend the audiobook version because J.P. Moore is an excellent reader aloud. He's got an attractive, emotive voice, expressive without being hammy, and he does the different voices of the characters in a way that won me over completely. Reading aloud is an underappreciated art form; I feel myself to be a good judge of readers because of all the time I spent as a child with my parents reading aloud, but I haven't really thought about beyond that context till now. A++ would listen again. Putting on a chapter of Toothless before I went to sleep at night was a lovely experience--much like being little and listening to my mother tell me a fairy tale before bed. Now that I've finished the book I miss it. Hm. I'll have to see if I can find an audiobook read by Christopher Lee for my next bedtime book. And sometime I'm sure I'll go back and listen through Toothless all over again.