Spot the Graveyard Book post..

The new Subterranean Press edition is gorgeous so I couldn’t resist posting a few pictures:

An intriguing black cover

Oh, ok, it was the wrong way up..

Inside the slipcase (Jungle Book style)

Photographic fold-out art

Signed by Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean

Gorgeous title page

Rejected Covers

Rejected Wrap-around cover

Spooky artwork

People who bought the book had the chance for their names to appear in the back to join the ghostly protectors of Bod in the graveyard..

Hey! That's me!

Monster eye

I showed in passing in my last post a quote from Douglas Adams:

Isn’t it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?

Now, he was talking about the the perverse nature of religious belief to demonstrate that he felt it was unnecessary.  Religion isn’t the only source of beliefs however, particularly for children and there are far better books to get them from than the Bible.

I’m referring of course to fairy tales, those windows into a more magical world where the wild things are, the denizens of the dark cupboards, mysterious castles and long forgotten kingdoms who teach us that there are monsters out there in the world.  In our current society we seem to be losing the need for monsters.  We shelter our children from the frightening and the upsetting, censor their stories and hamstrung their villains into comical figures, easy for heroes to vanquish and then allow to escape, shaking their fist at the hero as if they had just taken the last biscuit from the packet rather than destroy their entire life’s plans.

Would Disney’s Cinderella have been a better story if the evil sisters had chopped off their toes to fit into her shoes and had their eyes pecked out?  What about the evil queen in Snow White?  Should she have danced in red-hot iron shoes until she died?  Possibly, it certainly would have shown the results of their wickedness in an easy to understand form.  What of Little Red Riding Hood?  In the original story both Red Riding Hood and Grandmother are devoured by the wolf, who gets off scot free.  A scary ending, but gets the point of the story across far better than relying on a woodcutter always being there to rescue you.

Our time as children is when we learn how to behave in the world and we do them no favours by sheltering them from its nastier side.  In fact, they are generally much more resilient than you’d expect.  Neil Gaiman, an author who doesn’t shelter us from the frightening, found that adults generally find his book, Coraline, creepier than kids do.  [Neil incidentally has just been awarded the Newbery medal in the US for The Graveyard Book which is gloriously full of monsters.  Perhaps this is a turning point?]

These stories teach us that it is ok to be scared and brave when you face those fears and do something anyway.  That there are times when you win and times when you don’t and without the latter, the former wouldn’t exist.  For without monsters there is no cost to defeat and, without cost, there are no challenges, and without challenges, no thrill in victory or sadness in failure, just the grey depths of uniformity.

To end on another quote, this time from G.K. Chesterton:

Fairy tales are more than true — not because they tell us dragons exist, but because they tell us dragons can be beaten.

Photo: © TCMHitchhiker Creative Commons License

This is the first one I’ve seen that seems scary enough for the book.

I’ve been hoping that the movie would manage to preserve the air of fairy-tale menace that the story conjures up so I’m now optimistic that the film should be great too. Is it just me or does that doorway seem somewhat reminiscent of Being John Malkovich though?

You ask, What makes it worth defending? and the only answer I can give is this: Freedom to write, freedom to read, freedom to own material that you believe is worth defending means you’re going to have to stand up for stuff you don’t believe is worth defending, even stuff you find actively distasteful, because laws are big blunt instruments that do not differentiate between what you like and what you don’t, because prosecutors are humans and bear grudges and fight for re-election, because one person’s obscenity is another person’s art.

He was careful not to ally himself with either camp, pointing out that he doesn’t have a vote anyway (he has retained his British citizenship in case the Queen found out he’d moved..), but he did tell us all about his ‘man in Washington’.  Apparently he has worked quite closely with John McCain and pointed out that while he’s a nice guy he doesn’t know how to run his office and he’d be worried if he was going to run the country in the same way.

I don’t know, does the US need a big picture guy right now, or someone who is good at the details?  It sounds like John McCain certainly isn’t the latter.