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281 – Ferelfs
In retrospect, I really should have written “GINGERbread and circuses,” but then I didn’t feel like relettering that whole word balloon. So eh.
So first, you should go check out the fanart section, some new stuff there from leeloodallasmultigrain of https://www.Intragalacticcomic.com and some other pals!
On a completely different note, I want to talk about a couple of stories I’ve read recently. If you haven’t figured it out by now from the comic you’re reading, I am a huge fan of ‘children in peril’ horror stories. I don’t like to be one of those people who’s all OH I ONLY READ YA NOVELS BECAUSE THEY’RE SO MUCH MORE REAL, but I do find that kid horror has more resonance with me. I think it’s because most of it isn’t really intended as horror, just as really fussy moralizing, so the people writing it don’t even realize how traumatizing it is. Things like Pinnochio and Peter Pan and, above all, the Carebears in the Land without Feelings. Ugh. Anyway, there are certain tropes that kind of stick out to me as being part and parcel of this genre, things you tend to see in unexpurgated Grim’s fairy tales and darker kids’ fare WITH A LESSON like Pinnochio or Strewwelpeter. (I should post about my childhood Strewwelpeter obsession one of these days.) Things like corruption through temptation, innocence betrayed and ESPECIALLY unsettling body horror punishments for minor infractions. Maybe it’s because I remember being freaked out by so many of these things in TV specials as a kid that I’m still rather sensitive to it today.
ANYWAY, I recently read two stories that I was hoping might tap into that certain je nais se quoi that makes this genre compelling for me. One was Long Lankin by Lindsey Barraclough. I was really excited about this book, because it’s based on the creepy murder ballad of the same name, which I absolutely adore not least because of the haunting cover by Steeleye Span. The basic premise of the book is that young Cora and her little sister Mimi have been sent to live with their cantankerous elderly aunt out in her giant isolated farmhouse out on the moors. However, there’s something sinister and monstrous lurking around the wild wastes, something that none of the local adults want to talk about, but when the monster of the title comes looking to snatch away Mimi, Cora is forced into action. I was looking forward to this book, but, ultimately, it was kind of a disappointment. It’s not terrible, but Barraclough is a first time writer and it shows. The novel is written in the first person, but Cora’s descriptions of her surroundings sound way too verbose and erudite coming out of a child’s mouth. If it was written in third person, I could forgive this and it would have helped add to the atmosphere — but as it was, it just took me out of the story. A lot of readers have praised the book’s sustained creepy atmosphere, and, well, Barraclough is really good with description but she lays it on so thickly that it starts to lose some of its bite. Worst of all, though, is that the book is ALL description. It’s literally 400 pages of build-up, so I kept waiting for something, ANYTHING, to happen. Adults keep refusing to tell the main characters anything about what’s going on, so the kids mostly kust wander aimlessly through the book until the author realizes that OOPS nothing is happening so all of a sudden adults decide to start spilling the beans for no reason. The monster finally appears in the last 20 pages or so, but honestly I couldn’t finish it. I’d kept reading all through the previous 400 hoping that it would eventually get good, but when I realized I was at the book’s climax and it was still boring? Well, obviously there’s no hope from there, so I just gave up. Moody keeps giving me guff for that because she’s one of those people who HAS TO FINISH A BOOK once she’s started it. I, thankfully, am not.
Ultimately, it was really just a standard horror story with kids. Long Lankin is a monster who eats kids but there’s never any sense that there’s any real special reason that he seeks out kids other than that the author write him that way. The kids are just conveniently there.
The other story that I read was Wild Children by Richard Roberts aka Bowlingballhead, introduced to me by
Ribnose of Meadowhawk, and OMG this is soooo good! This story is the exact opposite in that it did everything right. It takes place in a vaguely fairytale world (I like that the time and place of the story is never well defined, adds to the dream/nightmare feel of it) in a village where children are warned that if they’re bad God will punish them by turning them into “wild children,” which are half-animal creatures that live out in the woods. Our heroine, Jenny, begins to doubt that becoming a wild child is much of a punishment after she meets the half-wolf boy Wolfgang and, more to the point, sees some of the things that adults justify in the name of keeping the village safe from his Wolfgang’s influence. The fact that the protagonists are kids is not incidental here, it’s VITALLY RELEVANT to the narrative — this is a story about the loss of innocence, hard choices about choosing your own path as you grow up. Also, instead of being passive bystanders, the kids take a active role here– everythingthat happens in this story is because of Jenny’s choices. It really taps into the confusion of being a kid just on the cusp of understanding the adult world. You guys should all read it. Basically, it’s all the things that I’ve wanted Guttersnipe to be. XD The first chapters are available on Deviantart, and Roberts has a bunch of other books on Amazon that I’m eager to check out.
Guttersnipe: https://www.guttersnipecomic.com
Murry Purry Fresh and Furry: https://www.murrypurry.com
SHOW: https://www.podcastigation.com
Tumblr: https://www.tumblr.com/blog/agoutirex
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/agoutirex
In retrospect, I really should have written “GINGERbread and circuses,” but then I didn’t feel like relettering that whole word balloon. So eh.
So first, you should go check out the fanart section, some new stuff there from leeloodallasmultigrain of https://www.Intragalacticcomic.com and some other pals!
On a completely different note, I want to talk about a couple of stories I’ve read recently. If you haven’t figured it out by now from the comic you’re reading, I am a huge fan of ‘children in peril’ horror stories. I don’t like to be one of those people who’s all OH I ONLY READ YA NOVELS BECAUSE THEY’RE SO MUCH MORE REAL, but I do find that kid horror has more resonance with me. I think it’s because most of it isn’t really intended as horror, just as really fussy moralizing, so the people writing it don’t even realize how traumatizing it is. Things like Pinnochio and Peter Pan and, above all, the Carebears in the Land without Feelings. Ugh. Anyway, there are certain tropes that kind of stick out to me as being part and parcel of this genre, things you tend to see in unexpurgated Grim’s fairy tales and darker kids’ fare WITH A LESSON like Pinnochio or Strewwelpeter. (I should post about my childhood Strewwelpeter obsession one of these days.) Things like corruption through temptation, innocence betrayed and ESPECIALLY unsettling body horror punishments for minor infractions. Maybe it’s because I remember being freaked out by so many of these things in TV specials as a kid that I’m still rather sensitive to it today.
ANYWAY, I recently read two stories that I was hoping might tap into that certain je nais se quoi that makes this genre compelling for me. One was Long Lankin by Lindsey Barraclough. I was really excited about this book, because it’s based on the creepy murder ballad of the same name, which I absolutely adore not least because of the haunting cover by Steeleye Span. The basic premise of the book is that young Cora and her little sister Mimi have been sent to live with their cantankerous elderly aunt out in her giant isolated farmhouse out on the moors. However, there’s something sinister and monstrous lurking around the wild wastes, something that none of the local adults want to talk about, but when the monster of the title comes looking to snatch away Mimi, Cora is forced into action. I was looking forward to this book, but, ultimately, it was kind of a disappointment. It’s not terrible, but Barraclough is a first time writer and it shows. The novel is written in the first person, but Cora’s descriptions of her surroundings sound way too verbose and erudite coming out of a child’s mouth. If it was written in third person, I could forgive this and it would have helped add to the atmosphere — but as it was, it just took me out of the story. A lot of readers have praised the book’s sustained creepy atmosphere, and, well, Barraclough is really good with description but she lays it on so thickly that it starts to lose some of its bite. Worst of all, though, is that the book is ALL description. It’s literally 400 pages of build-up, so I kept waiting for something, ANYTHING, to happen. Adults keep refusing to tell the main characters anything about what’s going on, so the kids mostly kust wander aimlessly through the book until the author realizes that OOPS nothing is happening so all of a sudden adults decide to start spilling the beans for no reason. The monster finally appears in the last 20 pages or so, but honestly I couldn’t finish it. I’d kept reading all through the previous 400 hoping that it would eventually get good, but when I realized I was at the book’s climax and it was still boring? Well, obviously there’s no hope from there, so I just gave up. Moody keeps giving me guff for that because she’s one of those people who HAS TO FINISH A BOOK once she’s started it. I, thankfully, am not.
Ultimately, it was really just a standard horror story with kids. Long Lankin is a monster who eats kids but there’s never any sense that there’s any real special reason that he seeks out kids other than that the author write him that way. The kids are just conveniently there.
The other story that I read was Wild Children by Richard Roberts aka Bowlingballhead, introduced to me by
Ribnose of Meadowhawk, and OMG this is soooo good! This story is the exact opposite in that it did everything right. It takes place in a vaguely fairytale world (I like that the time and place of the story is never well defined, adds to the dream/nightmare feel of it) in a village where children are warned that if they’re bad God will punish them by turning them into “wild children,” which are half-animal creatures that live out in the woods. Our heroine, Jenny, begins to doubt that becoming a wild child is much of a punishment after she meets the half-wolf boy Wolfgang and, more to the point, sees some of the things that adults justify in the name of keeping the village safe from his Wolfgang’s influence. The fact that the protagonists are kids is not incidental here, it’s VITALLY RELEVANT to the narrative — this is a story about the loss of innocence, hard choices about choosing your own path as you grow up. Also, instead of being passive bystanders, the kids take a active role here– everythingthat happens in this story is because of Jenny’s choices. It really taps into the confusion of being a kid just on the cusp of understanding the adult world. You guys should all read it. Basically, it’s all the things that I’ve wanted Guttersnipe to be. XD The first chapters are available on Deviantart, and Roberts has a bunch of other books on Amazon that I’m eager to check out.Guttersnipe: https://www.guttersnipecomic.com
Murry Purry Fresh and Furry: https://www.murrypurry.com
SHOW: https://www.podcastigation.com
Tumblr: https://www.tumblr.com/blog/agoutirex
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/agoutirex
Category All / Comics
Species Unspecified / Any
Size 830 x 1280px
File Size 333.9 kB
Why does he need to keep the elves occupied if they're worthless to him? And wait, sucking kids' lives away so he can live forever while making loyal mindless slaves isn't the REAL reason he does this? Geez that's ominous.
Erf, you're freaking me out a little by making me remember that Little Orphan Annie poem about children acting bad and then getting murdered and eaten by goblins. We had an illustrated copy in my elementary school that they force-read to us for some reason. Even at the time it seemed like an evil thing for adults to scare kids with the threat of death from imaginary sources. It's fine for kids to do it to themselves if they want, of course.
My public library also had these amazing anthologies of very serious and fairly nasty "children in peril" stories from the 60's, like Goosebumps only without the happy parts or relative lack of desire to wet the bed after reading one. There were also really dark sci-fi illustrated works from the same period, basically a couple of hundred pages of all the theoretical ways that aliens could implant mind-control eggs in your spleen or melt you and slurp you up like a milkshake.* Sadly, they're long gone. I remember the old, old library building, and having to search through the forbidden stacks in the narrow back hallways (narrow to a ten-year-old) to find that stuff, cause they didn't want kids to find it on the regular shelves... or more accurately, for adults to find it and whine. >.<
Hmm, first Ribnose, now you... might be past time for me to check out Wild Children.
*holy crap THAT is why I always stop and look at vore. *horrorface*
Erf, you're freaking me out a little by making me remember that Little Orphan Annie poem about children acting bad and then getting murdered and eaten by goblins. We had an illustrated copy in my elementary school that they force-read to us for some reason. Even at the time it seemed like an evil thing for adults to scare kids with the threat of death from imaginary sources. It's fine for kids to do it to themselves if they want, of course.
My public library also had these amazing anthologies of very serious and fairly nasty "children in peril" stories from the 60's, like Goosebumps only without the happy parts or relative lack of desire to wet the bed after reading one. There were also really dark sci-fi illustrated works from the same period, basically a couple of hundred pages of all the theoretical ways that aliens could implant mind-control eggs in your spleen or melt you and slurp you up like a milkshake.* Sadly, they're long gone. I remember the old, old library building, and having to search through the forbidden stacks in the narrow back hallways (narrow to a ten-year-old) to find that stuff, cause they didn't want kids to find it on the regular shelves... or more accurately, for adults to find it and whine. >.<
Hmm, first Ribnose, now you... might be past time for me to check out Wild Children.
*holy crap THAT is why I always stop and look at vore. *horrorface*
They're worthless to him, but they're also extremely violent and dangerous. He needs to keep them occupied mostly so that they don't gang up and attack him XD My feelings about the elves in this is that they're similar to Roman plebs, a generally unruly mob that needs to be constantly distracted from thoughts of rebellion.
Ooo I don't know that Little Orphan Annie poem! I'll have to look that up...
Wild Children is good stuff, I reccommend it! If the above review didn't make that explicit XD
Ooo I don't know that Little Orphan Annie poem! I'll have to look that up...
Wild Children is good stuff, I reccommend it! If the above review didn't make that explicit XD
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Orphant_Annie
This is it! I'd bet money that Amazon has a reprint of the fully illustrated version I remember.
This is it! I'd bet money that Amazon has a reprint of the fully illustrated version I remember.
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