Sunday September 18th, 2016 Peculiar Reads

In 2011, Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs was published. This young adult novel had an unusual hook: the characters and story were inspired by bizarre vintage photographs of children the author collected from flea markets. Riggs says, “I began to wonder who some of these strange-looking children had been [...] there was no way to know. So I thought: if I can’t know their real stories, I’ll make them up” (author interview, 2013 edition). The enigma of these odd characters attracted readers, and the book became a bestseller, quickly followed by two other titles in the series: The Hollow City and the Library of Souls. The movie adaptation arrives in theatres on Sept 30, and a graphic novel version is already available. The completed trilogy is very popular here at TBPL with both teen and adult readers due to its haunting atmosphere, original characters, and supernatural mystery.

There are other books that offer a similar mixture of atmosphere, whimsy, fantasy, and magic. Many of these begin in a world that seems like our own, but are slowly revealed to be just a little… unsettling. There might be a restricted swamp in an otherwise normal town, or ghosts who refuse to stay quiet. Characters work through supernatural mysteries or quests in these stories set partly in the liminal space between the real and unreal, where things are often quite peculiar.

Scowler by Daniel Kraus: Imagine your father is a monster. Would that mean there are monsters inside you, too? Nineteen-year-old Ry Burke, his mother, and little sister scrape by for a living on their dying family farm. Ry wishes for anything to distract him from the grim memories of his father's physical and emotional abuse. Then a meteorite falls from the sky, bringing with it not only a fragment from another world but also the arrival of a ruthless man intent on destroying the entire family. Soon Ry is forced to defend himself by resurrecting a trio of imaginary childhood protectors: kindly Mr. Furrington, wise Jesus, and the bloodthirsty Scowler.

The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman: Sussex, England. A middle-aged man returns to his childhood home to attend a funeral. Although the house he lived in is long gone, he is drawn to the farm at the end of the road, where, when he was seven, he encountered a most remarkable girl, Lettie Hempstock, and her mother and grandmother. He hasn't thought of Lettie in decades, and yet as he sits by the pond (a pond that she'd claimed was an ocean) behind the ramshackle old farmhouse, the unremembered past comes flooding back. And it is a past too strange, too frightening, too dangerous to have happened to anyone, let alone a small boy.

The Book of Lost Things: High in his attic bedroom, twelve-year-old David mourns the death of his mother, with only the books on his shelf for company. But those books have begun to whisper to him in the darkness. Angry and alone, he takes refuge in his imagination and soon finds that reality and fantasy have begun to meld. While his family falls apart around him, David is violently propelled into a world that is a strange reflection of his own -- populated by heroes and monsters and ruled by a faded king who keeps his secrets in a mysterious book, The Book of Lost Things.

Laura Prinselaar