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Graphic Novel Review: Dr. Herbert West & Astounding Tales in Medical Malpractice by Bruce Brown, illustrated by Thomas Boatwright

Dr. Herbert West & Astounding Tales of Medical Malpractice by Bruce Brown, illustrated by Thomas Boatwright

Arcana Studio, 2019

ISBN-13: 9781771352758

Available:  Paperback

 

With a foreword written by THE Jeffrey Combs, I knew I had to review this title.

Here begins the tale of young Dr. Herbert West: Re-Animator, legend, and genius. The story is told by his sister, Elizabeth Anne West (I happen to share first and middle names with our storyteller). The West family is constantly moving due to the young doctor’s scientific disasters(er, experiments), but despite all of that, she still loves her brother. After they settle in Providence, the family thinks things will settle down, but Lizzy knows better. One day while Lizzy is introducing her brother to the deliciousness of Johnny Cakes baked treats, the town doctor starts choking! He is saved by Dr. West, but the old doc isn’t right afterward. The townsfolk start visiting Young Doc West for their ailments, but he soon grows bored of treating them. So he starts experimenting…

Lizzy finds him in his basement laboratory with a familiar serum. When Lizzy demands to know what compelled him to create such a serum, he simply states, “I was bored.” The ravening horde of undead escape their basement prison to feast upon the only thing chewy and satisfying enough to sate their hunger…Johnny Cakes donuts. Can Lizzy and Herbert make it to Dean Allen Halsey at Miskatonic University in time?

I love everything about this book. The story is definitely all ages, even though Herbert goes into overly scientific explanations about, well, everything. It’s good we have Lizzy to remind him to use layman’s terms. The artwork is vibrant and colourful, and the action scenes are drawn so well. There is a panel where Lizzy is shaking Herbert wildly from side to side and I had to take a minute to finish because I was laughing so hard. This is a great book for anyone who likes a healthy dose of humor in their Lovecraft. Highly recommended.

Contains: unrelenting devouring of baked goods by the undead

 

Reviewed by Lizzy Walker

Posted on December 18, 2019 by , Reply

Book Review: The Grave Digger by Rebecca Bischoff

The Grave Digger  by Rebecca Bischoff

Amberjack Publishing, 2019

ISBN-13: 978-1948705523

Available: Pre-order, hardcover and Kindle edition

 

It’s 1875 in Circleville, Ohio. Captain Cooper’s mother is ill,  and the doctor has to be paid. Although Cap is not yet thirteen, his father has decided it’s time for him to join him and his partner Lum as a “resurrectionist”, a person who digs up dead bodies in order to sell them to medical schools for dissection. The plan is to dig up the bodies of those who won’t be missed (mostly “colored” people), but the dead don’t appear to be staying dead. Cap’s classmate Jessamyn comes back to life after he touches her, and the next body wakes up while they are actually digging. The secret activities of the grave diggers are out, and they have to cover them up and find other ways to acquire the bodies. Cap is spooked, but his mother’s medical bills still have to be paid, and his father insists this is the only way they can raise the money. Beyond acquiring the bodies, Cap realizes that there is a larger conspiracy at work, involving not just unsavory characters, but also some of the most respected individuals in town. While the newspaper stirs up the town, it is mainly the “colored” people who are affected, and their demands for a cemetery guard are left unanswered. We can all be grateful that this is a middle-grade novel and that, while a book about grave robbing, burying people alive, and human dissection will obviously have some disturbing moments, it doesn’t get gratuitously gruesome.

Racism in Circleville’s general population doesn’t rear its head in overtly violent ways, but in white people’s daily choices and conversations, like the Coopers’ housekeeper’s resentment of and unwillingness to interact with Jardine, an African-American woman who is a friend and hear of Cap’s mother, comments about “those people”, and the choice to zero in on body-snatching the African-Americans in the cemetery.  It intersects with sexism as well, with Jessamyn’s mother feeling that the only choice she has to support her child is sex work (it’s referred to indirectly), and Jardine’s daughter Delphia, after telling Cap of her ambition to be a doctor, bracing herself for the expected comment “but you’re a colored girl!” and laughing when he says “but you’re a girl!” instead (either way, in 1875, ten years after the Civil War ended, she’d be unlikely to get into medical school, but the book treats it like it’s a real possibility– props to Bischoff for that).  It is noticeable (and relevant to the present day) that there are so few consequences for anyone who participated in the grave-robbing scheme and lived to tell about it.  That’s probably realistic, and in a middle-grade novel you want things to turn out for the protagonist, but I think this ending requires a conversation. There is a myth in the Midwest that because the Underground Railroad had a strong presence that there must not have been other race-baced issues (I can’t tell you about Ohio specifically, but it’s definitely the case in Indiana), and this book exposes that.

There are a lot of schools that can’t officially celebrate Halloween (my district doesn’t allow it) but that doesn’t mean there aren’t ways to celebrate the season. The Grave Digger is a great historical fiction choice with a macabre touch to promote to the right elementary and middle-schoolers at this time of year.  Highly recommended.

Posted on October 4, 2019 by , Reply

Book Review: The Scary Stories Treasury: Three Books to Chill Your Bones by Alvin Schwartz, illustrated by Stephen Gammell

In honor of Banned Books Week, a review of Alvin Schwartz’s The Scary Stories Treasury, which had a place on the American Library Association’s Top 10 Banned and Challenged Books list from 2000-2009. This review was written about the hardcover edition of the original compilation, with illustrations by Stephen Gammell: it doesn’t appear to be available in hardcover at this time.

 

Scary Stories Treasury; Three Books to Chill Your Bones by Alvin Schwartz, illustrated by Stephen Gammell

HarperCollins Publishers, 2013

ISBN-13: 978-0060263416

Available: New and Used paperback

 

The Scary Stories Treasury contains three popular volumes of “scary stories”, collected from folklore and urban legends by Alvin Schwartz: Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, More Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, and Scary Stories 3: More Tales to Chill Your Bones. Any librarian who isn’t familiar with the books collected in this volume really needs to check them out. Not only are these titles in high demand for older children and teens, but they are an incredible storytelling resource. In fact, in the introduction to Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, Schwartz writes that scary stories are “meant to be told”.

 

Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark is the best known of the three books, and is the one I’ve used the most. It both starts and ends with “jump” stories, and these are fun to tell to a group. “The Viper” and “The Ghost with Bloody Fingers” are stories I’ve frequently told. Also included are the poem “A Man Who Lived in Leeds”, the song “Old Woman All Skin and Bone”, “The Hearse Song” and the Halloween game “The Dead Man’s Brains”. Other stories in the book include variants on familiar tales, such as “The Guests”, in which a young couple looking for a place to stay the night learn after the fact that their hosts were ghosts, and urban legends like “The Hook”, in which news that a murderer with a hook for a hand is on the loose spoils a date. Finally, there are some truly creepy and scary tales about ghosts, witches, shapeshifters, and the supernatural. While most of these come from folklore, and can’t be mistaken for anything happening today, they can still give readers, and listeners, the shivers.

 

More Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark has longer stories. Some are set in a specific historical period, such as “The Weird Blue Light”, which takes place during the Civil War. Many of them have sudden endings. In “Something Was Wrong”, we follow a bewildered and frightened John Sullivan around, learning only in the last few words that he is dead. Some folktales have clearly been adapted for a modern audience, such as “The Drum” an ominous contemporary variant of the folktale “The New Mother”. Schwartz doesn’t hold back or moralize when he retells a story. “Wonderful Sausage” is a clever and horrifying tale about a butcher who adds a special ingredient to his sausage. This volume also has a few more contemporary tales, ranging from frightening to tragic, and a description of the creepy sleepover game “A Ghost in the Mirror”. While the stories in this volume are more satisfying in many ways, I’d say these tales are aimed at a slightly older audience.

 

Scary Stories 3 continues with more detailed and sometimes complicated stories. In “Just Delicious”, a twist on the folktale “The Golden Arm”, a terrified wife feeds her husband a dead woman’s liver without his knowledge… and the woman wants it back. “Harold” is a chilling story of a vengeful doll. “The Wolf Girl”, set in a specific time and place, has its basis in the lives of real people, as does “The Trouble”, a story about poltergeist activity in the Lombardo household. “Maybe You Will Remember”, a baffling story about a girl whose sick mother disappears from her hotel, becomes truly horrifying when the reader turns to the notes at the back of the book to solve the puzzle. The volume wraps up with a couple of mildly funny stories. Of the three books, I’d say this is my least favorite, possibly because it is so grounded in detail, as details often distract listeners, making it harder to get them engaged in the story.

 

All three books have detailed notes and bibliographies provided by the author. While you don’t have to read the notes to enjoy the stories (with the exception of “Maybe You Will Remember”) they are easy to understand and interesting. All three books also have incredible illustrations by gifted children’s book illustrator Stephen Gammell, done in just black and white ink. It’s his illustrations that make the books so magnetic to kids… and so terrifying. The illustration for “Wonderful Sausage”, as an example,  brings a whole new grotesque dimension to the story. With just a few strokes and some shading, Gammell ups the scare level considerably. Tormented, skeletal faces, ragged clothes, distorted and indistinct figures, glowing eyes and teeth, empty chairs, empty baskets, empty clothes… it’s enough to cause nightmares, and makes much more impact than if we had only Schwartz’s words. Many collections of scary stories from American folklore don’t include illustrations, or at least not effective ones, and that is probably one of the reasons why more of them aren’t well known. The Scary Stories books, however, are notorious, to the point that the series was seventh on the American Library Association’s list of the most frequently challenged books for 2000-2009, and the illustrations are surely a good part of the reason why these books in particular are noticed.

 

The main benefit of owning The Scary Stories Treasury is that you’ll have all three books in one volume. Each book appears to have been faithfully reproduced, with Gammell’s original illustrations. However, there’s no new or additional material here. Readers who don’t have the books and want them might want to consider this volume, but for those who already own them, there’s no reason to purchase it. I highly recommend that libraries of all kinds have at least one copy of each of the books included in The Scary Stories Treasury, and the Treasury itself might make a nice reference volume, and you’ll find that the Scary Stories books are rarely on the shelves. The Scary Stories Treasury is highly recommended to libraries and readers who do not already own copies of the Scary Stories books, and recommended as a reference volume for school and public libraries. Appropriate, based on maturity of the reader, for grades 4 and up.

 

Contains: Violence, gore, cannibalism, deception, the occult, witchcraft, murder.

Review by Kirsten Kowalewski

Posted on September 27, 2019 by , 1 comment
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