Have You Read This? The Thief of Always

Kids everywhere are going back to school, and it’s a good chance that a few of those kids, depending on their locations and/or their imaginations, will be bored. Bored children will often have their minds wander, and in their wanderings may stumble onto places that appear bright and lovely but with a rotten core. Such is the case of Clive Barker’s foray into children’s literature, The Thief of Always, a book that seems to be everywhere but in actual libraries.

I’ve been to other libraries, and it seems like The Thief of Always gets no love, or at least no place on these library shelves. Frankly, the decision mystifies me. Neil Gaiman’s Coraline can be found in most libraries and was even a stop-motion movie. It is also very similar to the plot of The Thief of Always: child dissatisfied with the real world finds a totally different world that appears to cater to their desires until that world’s dark underbelly is discovered. To clarify, I’m not trying to disparage Coraline, a sweet adventure where a child comes to learns what family truly means to her, but it does seem suspicious that Thief doesn’t get the same accolades. Perhaps it is the fact that Thief was written by the same guy who gave us demonic entities into BDSM and really extreme piercing. I can imagine parents balking when having to explain to their young children why monsters are wearing similar leather and spikes outfits mommy and daddy have hanging in their bedroom closet.

But The Thief of Always is a beautifully written magical story that draws the reader into a fantasy world that rivals Coraline’s. Thief presents the trope we’ve seen in everything from Hansel and Gretel to Pinocchio to yes, Coraline, that age-old trope of being wary of something that’s literally too good to be true.  Bored stiff Harvey Swick is brought to Holiday House where he can enjoy all the seasons in a day, from lazy summer days to Christmas presents every night. Of course, Harvey Swick soon suspects there is something wrong with Holiday House. The tale then showcases a coming-of-age theme as young Harvey tries to take back what Mr. Hood, the mysterious proprietor of Holiday House, has stolen from him.

Yes, thematically and plot-wise, Coraline and Thief of Always are very similar to each other, but there are so many movies and books where kids get taken from the mundane into the magical, from Narnia to Harry Potter. But what makes Thief stand out, in particular, is that Harvey does indeed escape the horrors yet still voluntarily goes back. Granted, life had literally gone on without him, which necessitated his return, but Harvey could just have easily counted his blessings and simply stayed very clear of Mr. Hood until he died an old man. However, he goes back into the darkness, back behind the shadowy curtain, to both confront Mr. Hood and beat him at his own game. Many horror stories have the protagonist confront the monster and escape its clutches, leaving the protagonist to deal with the monster still being out there, merely biding its time, perhaps. There’s also horror where the protagonist returns to vanquish that monster, to prevent the evil from harming anyone else. Harvey Swick’s decision not to merely accept what his life had become after his escape but return to that monster and demand it gives back what he stole is what truly defines him as a hero instead of a mere protagonist.

Screen to Scream: Hellboy and . . . More Hellboy

Watching the recent Hellboy movie, I felt a little bit underwhelmed (luckily, David Harbour has that Stranger Things gig), or maybe I should say overwhelmed. Like many comic movies, the plot is stuffed full with reference after reference to Hellboy stories, which is not necessarily a good thing since Hellboy’s mythos is jam-packed with creatures from literally all of folklore and years of published material. The working man character of Hellboy, which Harbour portrayed well enough, makes him popular with readers, but his rich backstory cannot and should not be shoehorned into a just under two-hour movie.  

That said, I am more than willing to introduce people to this character’s history.  Screen to Scream is meant to be a gateway from horror film to horror literature.  Hellboy has had his adventures on the big and small screen but the Mike Mignola creation’s exploits had already been depicted in many a graphic novel and collection. Here are some of my favorite examples pulled from Hellboy: The Complete Short Stories, Vol. 1.

1) “House of the Living Dead” is an adventure that takes place during Hellboy’s disappearance in Mexico. One of the things that makes sure there are a wealth of Hellboy tales is his versatility. He’s a demon with a large stone hand, a herald of the Apocalypse who instead protects humanity. Hellboy’s backstory is so outlandish, while somehow grounded  in his working-class tough guy attitude, that he can be put in literally any kind of horror/fantasy story, and this story has a little bit of everything, from reanimated flesh golems a.k.a. Frankenstein’s monsters to werewolves to ghosts, and of course, Mexican lucha libre wrestling. This may seem like a kitchen sink kind of horror story, but in Hellboy’s universe it’s both a tragic tale and a showcase of what Hellboy and his large Right Hand of Doom does best.

2) “The Penangallan” showcases another appeal of Hellboy stories: how the authors of these tales, particularly Mignola, draw from all sorts of different folklore from around the world. Consider the titular monster that Hellboy must vanquish. The penangallan is a Malaysian vampire who, when the sun goes down, detaches its head from its body, and that head, dripping blood vessels and all, goes out to hunt for victims. A short but satisfying story, it shows how Hellboy deals with the unusual on a daily basis but handles it with the same simple pragmatism of a plumber dealing with a stubborn leak.

For fans of the Saturday Matinee creature feature, The Double Feature of Evil offers up two Hellboy stories that both reflect the hero’s charm that got him into three movies. Delving deep into his pulp roots, “Sullivan’s Reward” (3) is an interesting take on the possessed house trope that has Hellboy fighting a house. In this story, Hellboy receives punishment and much as he gives it. In the course of his fights, he’ll get knocked down, stabbed, what have you, but he gets back up, no matter how battered and bruised, to continue the fight. (4) “The House of Sebek,” on the other hand, showcases the sense of ironic humor that gives these brief interludes their staying power. Like “Pancakes,” also in this collection, though brief, these tales tell a complete story that may elicit a chuckle if one is not careful.  

5) “The Crooked Man” is one of my favorite Hellboy stories because it literally hits close to home. Hellboy’s job as a paranormal investigator has his traveling around the world, taking on deceased Nordic kings and their spirit wolves as well as the infamous Mexican bogeyman the Coffin Man, but for this story, he travels to the wooded hills of Appalachia to battle with the Crooked Man, an antagonist close to the literary Devil that beleaguered Young Goodman Brown and Daniel Webster, and Hellboy must also deal with some backwoods witchcraft. The Crooked Man is a standard Faustian devil trope, but in many ways is just as terrifying as a demon that lets its head fly around at night to feed. Like many good devils in search of souls, it offers promises of power and desire, and the cost of the soul seems so little until it’s actually lost, proving once and for all that Hellboy is more than a mascot or figure that launched a thousand awesome cosplays. Hellboy’s endearing personality, unending fortitude, and even his unique humanity allows him to fight everything that goes bump in the night.  

Have You Read This? The Ice Cream Man series

Scott McCloud, author of Understanding Comics, beautifully illustrates the difference between genre and medium using a pitcher. The medium, like the pitcher, merely contains the ideas put into it. He uses this also to illustrate how comics and graphic novels aren’t just for children, or simply “less” than books without pictures. Using panels of pictures to tell a story, McCloud argues, isn’t just for kids. Rather, it depends on the content, of the sophistication of the ideas explored through those panels. Some horror aficionados may say that graphics in horror strip away the unknown, a definite appeal to horror, according to Lovecraft, thus denying the reader the opportunity to imagine the monster rendered there on the page, but there are comics and graphic novels that incorporate the medium in new and exciting ways to grab the audience by the throat and keep them terrified. An example of this is the Ice Cream Man series, by W. Maxwell Price, with art by talents like Martin Morazzo, and Chris Halloran, is one such example.

This series isn’t about one story; rather, it’s a Twilight-Zone like journey through multiple tales of weirdness. All these tales are linked through the titular Ice Cream Man, who changes from a Rod Serling or Cryptkeeper kind of character that introduces these tales to actually inflicting misery on these poor souls. The later volumes give readers a glimpse into his bizarre and otherworldly backstory, but the real joy of this series is the straight-up originality and sheer variety of the stories and how they are told. Here are some of the wilder examples:

1. A one-hit wonder who finds his purpose when he helps a group of song titles liberate their domain (You read that right, song titles).
2.   A man somehow lives three different timelines, finding three times the tragedy, madness, and burdening knowledge of the human experience. 
3. Dog brain surgeons. Not surgeons who operate on dogs, but dogs who are little brain surgeons. They wear scrubs and everything.  
4. A man trapped in a neverending lineup of demented reality television. 
5.  A space adventure at the end of humanity’s existence.

There are also some more down-to-earth, traditional horror dealing with subjects like drug addiction and a child’s first encounter with death, but they still greatly utilize images to tell their story and tug on the readers’ heartstrings. Like any good salesman of frozen treats, the Ice Cream Man has all sorts of flavors, whether you’re into vanilla hauntings or prefer a butter pecan existential dread.