David R. Loy and Linda Goodhew's "The Dharma of Dragons and Daemons" is subtitled "Buddhist Themes in Modern Fantasy," which is a more accurate description of what the book is about. Though Loy and Goodhew have clearly enjoyed the fantastic works they examine, their primary focus is less on the works as such than on the Buddhist lessons the works might impart.
This is not to say, however, that readers less interested in Buddhism than in the work of J.R.R. Tolkien, Michael Ende, Philip Pullman, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Hayao Miyazaki will be disappointed. The authors' analyses of these artists' creations are skillfully enough done that readers will be eager to move on from Loy and Goodhew's considerations of the art to the art itself. To give rise to such an impulse is one of the noblest things criticism can do.
"This book," the authors explain, "is about . . . Buddhist stories: not about stories to be found in Buddhism, but about the 'Buddhism' to be found in some modern stories . . . about the Dharma -- the basic teachings of Buddhism -- as presented in some classics of contemporary fantasy." It is, therefore, one of the few books that belongs on the same shelf as R.H. Blyth's "Zen in English Literature and Oriental Classics." Both books endeavor in part to find Zen in the work of authors who were in many cases not Buddhist at all.