Book-A-Day 2014 #81: The Rime of the Modern Mariner by Nick Hayes

With Coleridge, a man had a chance -- his long-winded mariner only "stoppeth one of three." In Nick Hayes's modern retelling, his mariner latches upon a man alone in a park, having a quick lunch after signing the papers to make his divorce final, and for him there is no escape. (Though, weirdly, he pays the mariner in the end for wasting his time with a long story the divorcee hates and disdains. Perhaps this is some obscure British custom I'm not familiar with.)

The Rime of the Modern Mariner follows its original in broad outlines, substituting a more obvious and pointed ecological message for Coleridge's vaguer demand to care for the creatures of the world, and turning Coleridge's terrible and beautiful spectre of Life-in-Death to a similarly more obvious and hectoring representation of Gaia. However, Hayes doesn't just deliver verse here; his Modern Mariner is a full graphic novel, with hundreds of intricate and beautiful pages to hammer home Hayes's message that man is bad and nature awesome.

Hayes's mariner is "modern" -- meaning that he's of his own time, exactly as Coleridge's was. (Coleridge's mariner was not "ancient" in the sense of being Roman or australopithecine; he was an old man, and moreover, the implication was that he was made old by his ordeal.) He's also not really a mariner; he took ship in Japan purely because he wanted to make a set of dominoes from the bones of a whale, and a whale-hunting ship gave him a place aboard. Inasmuch as the pre-ordeal Mariner has any character, he's a liberal's caricature of a hunter: randomly destructive and callous, unthinking and unfeeling and focused entirely on his own urges.

Of course, that changes quickly, with the inevitable albatross-killing leading quickly to the whale-hunting ship becoming becalmed in the North Pacific Gyre, and in particular the mass of plastic trash contained there. (The whaleship, like its 18th century counterpart, clearly has no way to contact shore from the middle of the sea, because communications through the aether are impossible.) As in Coleridge, the Mariner must be taught a hugely disproportional lesson for the killing of one sea-bird, and so the rest of the crew quietly dies (just as in Coleridge) and the Mariner undergoes a series of ordeals and visions, which are all hauntingly drawn and deeply felt, before he's thrown up on a foreign shore to go forth and spread his Not-So-Good News.

Modern Mariner is very high quality agitprop: Hayes clearly believes deeply in his message and has marshaled all of his considerable powers for words and pictures in service of that message. But the message itself is no more specific than Coleridge's, and Hayes ends with an unearned nihilistic vision that leaves a sour taste in the reader's mouth. Hayes explicitly positions his ecological message here as useless: he is saying that he knows what is right for the world, and that the world will inevitably reject that plan and be doomed. That will be energizing for the very young and the very committed, but the rest of us are likely to scoff and move on; I don't expect Rime of the Modern Mariner to make many converts.

Still: it is gorgeous, and gripping, and utterly engrossing. Read it as art rather than propaganda, and you may find it a deeply moving experience.

Book-A-Day 2014 Introduction and Index
 

Book-A-Day 2014 #80: Sunny, Vol. 1 by Taiyo Matsumoto

Everyone grows up alone. No matter how many people you have around you, no matter how large or loving the family, turning into an adult is something that happens inside, where no one else can see or help. That doesn't mean, though, that having other people around -- the right people, the ones who care for and about you -- wouldn't help.

The kids in Taiyo Matsumoto's series Sunny don't have even that much luck. They're growing up with each other and hired help, living in a group home somewhere uninteresting sometime on the downhill side of the 1970s. It's not quite an orphanage, since we know that many or most of them have living parents that gave them up, but it's the same effect: a few adults, closer to teachers or bosses than parents, and a bunch of kids raising themselves. And the one place that is theirs -- not belonging to any of the adults, not the school where they're forced to go, a place to escape and dream -- is the old, probably derelict yellow Nissan Sunny 1200 in the yard of that house.

Each chapter -- this first volume reprints six of them -- tells a story focusing on one of the kids of that house, from nerdy new kid Sei to white-haired wild child Haruo to possibly learning-disabled Junsuke to would-be drop-out teen Kenji to Megumi (who Haruo has a crush on) to Keiko (who has a crush on Haruo) to the massively overweight and simple Taro. Matsumoto looks at them in turn, like a literary writer, examining the house and its inhabitants from all angles and displaying all of the interesting things he finds.  There may be a larger plot to the story, eventually -- but, for these first six chapters, we're still settling in and learning who everyone is at the Star Child Home.

Matsomoto is assured and confident in his abilities at this point in his career -- with the Eisner-winning Tekkon Kinkreet behind him, among other works (I reviewed his Gogo Monster during the last stint of Book-A-Day) -- and he's secure enough to let that settling-in happen, to shift from character to character to introduce us to every inhabitant of the home. His art is more personal and impressionistic than most of the manga we see in the US, equally focused on faces and on objects like the Sunny, and we come to know what these boys and girls care about from what they do and so to each other.

Sunny, so far, is more than a little unsettling, as growing up is always unsettling -- it's the time when everything changes and all expectations are thwarted. It's understated and complex and surprising and always closely observed -- a great comic by any name and an excellent book of character and nuance and detail.

Book-A-Day 2014 Introduction and Index

Book-A-Day 2014 #79: Daisy Kutter: The Last Train by Kazu Kibuishi

Once there was a great bandit by the name of Daisy, battling the law and stealing vast sums across a bleak Western landscape enlivened only by cute steampunky robots. But that was years ago: she's settled down now, retired to run a general store in a sleepy town, with her ex-partner (and ex-boyfriend) as the local sheriff.

Of course, if there's one thing we know about Westerns at this point in our history, its that gunslingers never really retire. Even if they think they have, there's always one last job, or one deal they can't refuse, or one name out of their past, until the guns get picked up again and the bullets start flying. This is no exception: there's a job only Daisy Kutter can do, and the man who needs it done won't take no for an answer.

Ten years ago, Kazu Kibuishi -- at about the same time he was assembling the first two Flight anthologies -- put out his first major solo comics work, a four-issue miniseries about that ex-gunslinger and the One Last Job she was dragged into. Early in 2005, it was collected as Daisy Kutter: The Last Train but it's been out of print most of the time since -- even a Kickstarted reprint was nearly two years ago, and probably unavailable as well.

This is Kibuishi pre-Amulet, and working in black and white, but it's recognizably his art from the first page -- square jaws, cute robots, a light manga influence in the action sequences, and all. Daisy herself is too good to be true: she's more of a type than an actual character, though making her female does move her away from the absolute standard of the type. The plot moves well and crackles with energy, though it's not likely to really surprise you. And, since Amulet is still developing complications as it charges into its sixth book later this year, it's great to see that Kibuishi can create an entire story -- beginning, middle, and end -- and do it well.

If you can find this, it's a lot of fun -- the steampunk stuff is mostly background and villainous maguffins, but it's suitably steamy-looking. And Daisy herself is tough and laconic and an absolute dead shot, just as she absolutely has to be.

Book-A-Day 2014 Introduction and Index

Book-A-Day 2014 #78: A Game for Swallows by Zeina Abirached

No artistic work should be judged by its imitators or successors: would you want to count Sharknado against Jaws? But, sometimes, the bones of the originator are so near to the surface of the later work that they need to be acknowledged immediately.

Zeina Abirached's first graphic novel is A Game for Swallows, and it screams Persepolis at the top of its lungs. It's not Abirached's fault: she's another woman who grew up in a strife-ridden country in the Middle East (Lebanon, in her case) and who fled with her family to France when still young. It's true that even her artistic style -- all big slabs of black and precise white outlines, looking like woodcuts or scratchboard -- is reminiscent of Marjane Satrapi, but style is style, and can't be held against the artist.

But, still: A Game for Swallows will inevitably be reminiscent of Persepolis, for good or bad. Abirached's story is very different, though: she tells us about one evening during the Lebanese civil war, one day in 1984 after the fighting had forced her family to move into one tiny foyer of their large apartment for safety, one day when her parents were visiting Abirached's grandmother a few streets away on the other side of the all-important dividing Green Line.

So where Persepolis was trying to show the complex life of a teenager being stifled by her culture, A Game for Swallows isn't Abirached's story at all: she's only three years old when this happened, and she and her brother are more Maguffins than anything else. They're the ones at home while the parents are away; the people who belong in the foyer while the rest of the building assembles for safety and gossip -- ostensibly to watch the children until the parents return.

A Game for Swallows has no politics in it: it takes place during a war, but its viewpoint on that war is that of a child. It will not tell us who the fighters are or what they want. There are incoming and outgoing shells, but we don't know from who or where they're landing. Even the sniper at the end of the main street is just an obstacle: just another lousy thing that happens and causes danger. It could almost be any danger, since we don't see the people behind it.

But it is about all of those people in the apartment building: the couple who hope to emigrate to Canada before the pregnant wife comes to term, the well-dressed ex-teacher mourning his twin brother, the pseudo-building superintendent and general fixer, the old lady who spent her life raising generations of other people's children, the ex-restauranteur and his wife. They are all vivid; they are all real. Abirached doesn't belabor the point, but one phrase recurs over and over again: before the war. Everyone was someone else, before the war: they all had lives and jobs and bright futures, and now they're huddling in a small room, trying to stay alive and get out of Beirut.

Most anti-war books try to overwhelm and horrify, but A Game for Swallows plays a quieter game. It shows a society that was utterly smashed by a war and doesn't need to ask if it was worth the destruction. It's rare to see such restraint and understatement from a creator so young -- Abirached was only 26 when this was published in France in 2007 -- and I hope that implies a long and interesting career for her. There are surely many other stories she can tell, her own and others. Her stark inky drawings similarly show a command of space and gesture unusual in a first work -- it's already been seven years since A Game for Swallows, so I have to wonder what she's gotten up to since. I expect it has been marvelous.

Book-A-Day 2014 Introduction and Index

Book-A-Day 2014 #77: Insufficient Direction by Moyoco Anno

Every tribe of geeks has their king. For some it's Wil Wheaton, for others Linus Torvalds, and the name of Nate Silver is not without power. We could name several dozen others, and argue about them -- because if there's one thing that geeks like to do, it's argue about who is geeky enough and who isn't. But everyone can point to someone that he thinks is geeky enough, that is worthy to be the king.

One of the names that would come up in the right circles is Hideaki Anno, animator, director of Neon Genesis Evangelion, and lifelong otaku. If you polled Japanese geeks, he'd consistently be in the top five -- he's obsessive about all of the expected things for a man of his generation, and the source of much obsession in the generation that followed.

He also married the noted cartoonist -- I should say manga-ka in this context -- Moyoco Anno in 2002. And we all know what happens when you're that close to a storyteller: you become part of her stories, one way or another, like it or not.

So Moyoco Anno created an strip about her marriage, under the title Insufficient Direction, which ran occasionally from 2002 through 2004. It was collected in Japan soon afterward, though it took a long time to be translated for the US market -- geekery, particularly as hardcore as Hideaki's, is very specific to its time and place, and doesn't travel easily. The US collection of Insufficient Direction contains an impressive thirty-page section of annotations, explaining all of the obscure references and half-mentioned titles -- though that can make the reading experience more like The Canterbury Tales than Kamui.

The book collects the twenty-two installments of Insufficient Direction, all of them featuring Moyoco Anno as a spiral-eyed toddler called "Rompers" and her husband as the portly, distracted "Director-kun." (I have to assume the title is a pun on his title, but that's one of the few things the book does not annotate.) Hideaki Anno also contributes an afterword, giving him his own voice in the book mostly about him as seen from his wife's point of view and letting him define what he thinks it means to be an otaku. The overall story details how Rompers becomes nearly as big an otaku as her husband over the first few years of their marriage -- oh, she does influence him a little bit, here and there, to lose weight for a while or change his clothes more often than once a week, but the bulk of the changes are on her side. Each installment is six pages long -- enough to detail the events of one day, or one obsession, or one step forward in the marriage (buying a house, for example).

All of those installments, no matter what events they're ostensibly about, are really about Director-kun: how he is strange and obsessive, how he is resolutely strange, and how Rompers loves him despite all of it. It's a touching, if very odd, portrait of a marriage of two quirky individuals -- though Moyoco Anno, I'm sure, has more foibles and moods than the exasperated anger and bewildered acceptance that she gives to Rompers most of the time here.

A reader does have to dig through the geeky minutiae of Hideaki Anno's favorite media to get to that, though, so Insufficient Direction is best for those whose geekiness already tends in that direction: if you can catch half of Moyoco Anno's references, you'll be doing well. For many readers, that won't be worth it to dig into the love story at its core. But, for the right kind of geek, this is the very best love story possible.

Book-A-Day 2014 Introduction and Index

Book-A-Day 2014 #76: Monsters Eat Whiny Children by Bruce Eric Kaplan

I want each of these Book-A-Day posts to stand alone: each a little essay about (more or less) the book in question, but reaching out further than the book for something profound, or funny, or maybe just grumpy. But reading isn't that neatly compartmentalized: one book leads to another, and even different things bounce off each other in your head in ways you couldn't expect. So that first wish will be thwarted, at least some of the time, by fate and chance and references to other things.

Which is a long way around to saying that today's book only turned up because Bruce Eric Kaplan's Everything Is Going to Be Okay was Day 72, and, while researching that post, I noticed that Kaplan had done a couple of picture books that I hadn't heard of before.

One of those books was Monsters Eat Whiny Children, and how could I avoid that? My own children have mostly grown out of the whiny phase into the sullen phase -- not that they're that sullen, most of the time, but they're 16 and 13, so some sull must be expected -- but that's a title designed to make every parent remember the worst days of the Terrible Twos (or Threes, or Fives) and wish for a metaphorical cudgel as well-placed as this book. So: the library had it, and soon I had it, and reading a picture book takes almost no time at all.

Monsters Eat Whiny Children tells the story of Henry and Eve, two "perfectly delightful children who were going through a terrible phase, which is to say they whined all day and night." Their father -- who I'm pretty sure is Kaplan himself -- warns them of the danger of monsters, but they're too whiny to listen, and are soon taken for the stew-pot. But the monsters have their own troubles, much like Kaplan's humans, and squabble over the best recipes for whiny children. Eventually, of course, the children get away, uneaten.

Along the way, there's space for some nice Kaplan lines -- my favorite is "Sometimes it's so hard to figure out if you're in the mood for Indian food." -- and for amusing arguments about how best to prepare whiny children.

Kaplan's style here is blocky and sparse -- just like his cartoons, though given more space to breathe with the absence of panel borders -- unlike anything else I've seen in a picture book, which is quite appealing. (Though some parents will look at his art, declare that it's unfinished or some such bumf, and refuse this book. They are whiny too, in their own way, and should watch out that they're not eaten by monsters.) Monsters Eat Whiny Children is funny, looks interesting, and has a good message sneakily delivered: it delivers on all of the needs of a book designed to be read to small squirming humans. And you still can't beat that title.


Book-A-Day 2014 Introduction and Index

Book-A-Day 2014 #75: Bubbles & Gondola by Renaud Dillies

I may have been the only one to make this mistake, but I'll point it out, just in case. This is not the story of two characters, one named Bubbles and the other Gondola. I don't know why I thought that, but it's how this book was slotted in my brain from the moment I saw it in 2011 until I actually read it. So, if you have an unreasoning dislike for characters named Bubbles, you don't need to avoid this book. (If you have an unreasoning dislike for anthropomorphic mice, though, I can sadly inform you that the figure on the cover is indeed our hero.)

Bubbles & Gondola is actually an allusive title, about creativity and spontaneity: two things the main character of this graphic novel -- one Charlie the Mouse, a novelist going through a very rough patch in his work -- is having great trouble with when we meet him. He's deeply alone, and mostly happily so -- he doesn't like other people much, or enjoy being around them -- but he's got the terror of the blank page, and nothing at all is flowing.

But a little blue bird who calls himself Charlie's Solitude arrives, and begins the process of pulling Charlie out of himself, at least a little bit, and getting him to re-engage with the world and start refilling his vats of inspiration. (Dillies never says the latter, or has any character say it, but he doesn't need to: it's clear that Charlie's problem is that his own head, anyone's own head, can never be enough inspiration for art.) Bubbles & Gondola is not a story of plot; it's a series of events in which Charlie is forced back into the world and rediscovers how much joy and excitement are out there.

Dillies draws Charlie's solitude and tentative explorations in an expressive, crosshatched style with clear antecedents in early 20th century newspaper comics and animated cartoons and a deft hand at transitions from dream to visions to reality and back again. This is a fine book for any artist or would-be artist -- or just any of us who have a tendency to spend too much time in our own heads, without anyone else for company.

Book-A-Day 2014 Introduction and Index

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 3/15

This weekly post always begins with some version of a disclaimer: that these books just arrived in my mailbox, sent by their publishers, and that I haven't read any of them yet. Well, this week, that's not true for one of them, since I'm in the middle of reading it right now. (It still applies to everything else, though: even with my current Book-A-Day pace, I'm not reading as much or as quickly as I did fifteen/twenty years ago, before kids and responsibilities and Internets.)

So I'll lead off with the book I'm reading now: Terry Pratchett's new Discworld novel, Raising Steam. I got the galley a few weeks back, and the final hardcover arrived early this week. It's being published by Doubleday on the 18th, as part of a full-court blitz on Pratchett from Doubleday and related imprints over the next year and a half: besides this, they're also bringing out all four Science of Discworld books for the first time in the US, collections of Pratchett's short non-fiction and fiction, The Compleat Ankh-Morpork, the second Discworld-related picture-book-that's-not-really-for-kids in The World of Poo, and a book that I'll discuss immediately below.

(Pratchett is a decently strong seller in the US these days, but, since he's a massive cultural institution in the UK, there's always a sense from his US publishers that they should do better. That's of course good for Sir Terry's profile, and he could definitely sell better -- every writer could sell better, since there are so many people who only read a couple of books a year -- but there's no way he could ever be as big in the States as he is in the UK, so I hope they're all reasonable in their dreams.)

Raising Steam is another Moist von Lipwig book, which is mildly disappointing: his name is silly and distracting, and isn't representative of most of Pratchett's humor, on the one hand, and he's actually a thin and not particularly interesting character on the other hand. In the usual vein of the recent "X comes to Discworld, making people more tolerant and modern and good" plots, this is the book about railroads. Expect a full Book-A-Day post within the week.

(And I see that Pratchett is still getting odd covers in the US. The type is bland and slapped on, and the art is too cartoony, without any energy or tension. No one has managed to find a really good and appropriate cover style for him here, and so the US tends to go either too cartoony -- misunderstanding what has made Josh Kirby and then Paul Kidby's covers work in the UK for so long -- or aggressively iconic, like the Harper covers around 2000. The UK, by comparison, has a nice Kidby cover and a solid series design. Yet another thing I would fix if I were King of Publishing.)

The other Pratchett-related book I have on hand is The Folklore of Discworld, which Pratchett wrote with Jacqueline Simpson and which was published in the UK back in 2008. This one seems to be a revised edition, since it declares that it covers all forty Discworld books to date, and is copyright both 2008 and 2014. It's non-fiction, connecting the Discworld stories with real-world folklore and vice versa. And it's an Anchor trade paperback, on sale March 25th.

I have three manga volumes from Vertical, all of which I think are March publications:

First up is From the New World, Vol. 3 written by Yusuke Kishi and drawn by Toru Oikawa. I reviewed the second volume last month if you want more details, but this is a YA dystopia set in a devastated future Earth with only a few humans (all Japanese, with supernatural powers) and a massive underclass of animal-like Morph Rats.

Then there's Tsutomu Nihei's Knights of Sidonia, Vol. 8, continung the dark story of the sole remnant of humanity fleeing the usual creepily-organic superpowerful aliens in a single ship, protected by a few young pilots and their giant robot starfighters. I reviewed the first book last year, if you'd like more. 

And last from Vertical this week is Moyoco Anno's Insufficient Direction, which I was actually thinking about buying myself after seeing other reviews. (Thanks, Vertical!) It's a fictionalized version of Anno's life with her anime director husband Hideaki Anno, with Moyoco depicting herself as a bratty toddler, Rompers, and her husband as a slobby otaku. Anno's best known for her series Sugar Sugar Rune, and I reviewed her standalone book Sakuran as Day 51 of my current Book-A-Day run.

Michael J. Sullivan is best-known for his epic fantasy series The Riyria Revelations -- originally self-published and now available from Orbit in omnibus editions -- but he's branching out into science fiction with the upcoming novel Hollow World. Sullivan ran a very successful Kickstarter to fund this book -- he was 1008% overfunded, one of Kickstarter's top ten fiction projects -- and now the print edition is coming out from Tachyon Publications as a trade paperback on April 15th. Hollow World is some sort of time-travel story with a terminally ill hero; I suspect it is not the hardest of SF.

Of all the things I could have expected from publishing this year, a new edition of stories by Clark Ashton Smith was far down the list. A Penguin Classics edition of Smith stories seemed even less likely, but here's one in front of me: The Dark Eidolon and Other Fantasies, selected and introduced by S.T. Joshi, will be hitting stores on March 25th. I haven't read Smith in ages -- he's probably the most-forgotten of the major Weird Tales writers of his era, not as horrific as Lovecraft or as adventurous as Howard -- but this looks like a great excuse to read him again.

And last this week is Mentats of Dune, the new novel by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson, which I believe is the fourth in the sub-series telling the story of the Butlerian Jihad. (Which was hundreds of years before Dune, and had nothing to do with that planet, but let's not dwell on that.) This is a Tor hardcover, arriving March 11th.

And, just because I was wondering myself: Frank Herbert wrote six Dune novels over twenty years, during which time he also wrote about a dozen other novels. This is the thirteenth Dune novel by his son -- more than twice as many as Frank -- in about fifteen years. Publishing is indeed ravenous for product.

Book-A-Day 2014 #74: Isle of 100,000 Graves by Vehlman and Jason

A few days ago, I wrote here that Paul Pope was the creator most difficult to search for in online databases. It is true that Pope is difficult to search for, but I'd forgotten the eternal champion of unfindability: the Norwegian cartoonist who goes by the name Jason. It's a testament to the power of his work that he hasn't sunk utterly without trace due to the genericism of his name.

Isle of 100,000 Graves is not a pure Jason book, and so it will be easier to find in those databases: it was written by Fabien Vehlmann, current writer of the long-running Spirou series and writer of many other comics projects (including the recent Day 47, Beautiful Darkness, with the husband-and-wife team Kerascoet and the even more recent Day 66, Last Days of an Immortal, with Gwen De Bonneval). And "Fabien Vehlmann" is a name designed for search, one a SEO would cackle in delight when it turned up on his dashboard.

None of that has anything to do with the story, of course.

Isle is only slightly out of Jason's usual wheelhouse: it's a historical pirate story rather than a modern genre tale (of detectives or zombies or time-travel or whatever), but it's still set among a very Jason-esque cast of self-doubting stone-faced humanoids with bare animal feet and vaguely animal-looking faces. But, unlike the usual for Jason, our main character is a young girl, Gwenny, and she's much more self-directed, sneaky, and resourceful than the protagonists of the stories Jason writes for himself.

Gwenny's father found a map to a treasure buried on the fabled Isle of 100,000 Graves, and disappeared in search of it five years ago. Gwenny finds a map herself, and decides to follow her father. That's the story as we're supposed to believe it at the beginning, though it's nowhere near the whole truth.

But Gwenny does find a ship willing to take her, and a big one-eyed pirate she manipulates into getting her off the ship to the island. But it's not called the Isle of 100,000 Graves for nothing. It's the home of the Hangman's Academy, which trains a horde of hooded killers and torturers -- for what purpose, it's not clear. But among those apprentice headsmen is Tobias, who may have the soul of a poet, and who is quite good at interrogations, but who completely fails to get the knack of killing.

This is enough of a Jason book that everything goes wrong from there, and that there isn't a clearly happy ending. But it's less bleak than many of his solo works, either because or in spite of Vehlmann's contribution. Jason's characters are as blank-faced as ever: the reader has to imagine most of their interior lives, because Jason will depict only a few moments of supposed high emotion with a tear or an angry word. It's not one of Jason's very best works -- and not quite as strong as the other two books of Vehlmann's I've read recently -- but it's a wonderfully dark and deadpan tales of pirates and torturers, better than most of what you'd find in a comics shop on any random day.

Book-A-Day 2014 Introduction and Index

Book-A-Day 2014 #73: The Ghastly Ones and Other Fiendish Frolics by Richard Sala

Richard Sala is sui generis, but his graphic novels do tend to have the same elements over and over again: the plucky young girl, barefoot and inquisitive; her hapless young man, destined for a sad end; various fiends in almost-human form; dark and creepy towns, far away from the main roads, with crooked houses and sinister secrets. Those are wonderful elements, particularly in Sala's hands, but it can make his books difficult to differentiate quickly.

The Ghastly Ones & Other Fiendish Frolics, though, is not a collection of Sala's comics: it collects four illustrated stories in verse, and came out very early in his career (1995, soon after Black Cat Crossing). So it has some of those elements -- more of the creeps than the girls, more of the frights than the stories -- but it's much more obviously inspired by Charles Addams than his mature work.

So there are four stories here -- tales or poems is probably the more appropriate word, since they're vignettes or collections of moments in verse -- each about various kinds of nastiness. The title piece, which is nearly half the length of the whole book, anatomizes a series of murderers and worse, while "The Morbid Musings of Malcolm de Mulch" describes one nervous young man worried about which way he will die. "The Skulkers" is another sequence, with a portrait on one page and a descriptive couplet on the other: these folks might not necessarily all be murderers and criminals. And lastly is "Beware, Beware," the warning given by an old lady to a man who possibly is her grandson.

They're all short and amusing, light-hearted in Sala's dark and morbid way. This book is long out of print, which is a pity: it's a great gateway from Addams (or, perhaps, from Gahan Wilson) to Sala, which is a natural progression. I'll admit this is minor Sala, but even in the mid-90s his grotesques were magnificent, full of unique faces and garishly twisted bodies. This is worth looking at just for Sala's lovely, horrible art, leaving everything else aside.


Book-A-Day 2014 Introduction and Index