Home » Posts tagged "Monster Librarian" (Page 4)

Kaiju Lovers Are The Best: G-Fest Report

The Monster Kid chatting with a kaiju at G-Fest’s Dojo Studios

This past weekend we went to G-Fest, a Godzilla fan convention in Chicago. The Monster Kid comes by his love of monsters honestly– he inherited it from his dad. The Monster Librarian has been a kaiju lover since before I met him, and in our first apartment I couldn’t walk through our shared study without some crazy looking critter falling on me. Boxes more of them in boxes were stacked in the closet until we moved out and my mom, over his intense objections, took all of them out of their original packaging to make them fit better in the packing boxes (all collectors wince now). The monsters were packed away in boxes again when we transformed the study in our first house into a bedroom in preparation for the arrival of the Monster Kid, and when we moved to a bigger house, they were packed into a closet. But not forgotten.

When the Monster Kid was about four, Dylan pulled out a giant tub of action figures and said, “I don’t think I can count on these being collectibles anymore. I want to take them out and play with them with the kids.” I was a little wary of this as toddlers and preschoolers aren’t generally known to be gentle with their toys. But his enthusiasm was contagious. Suddenly the Lego table became a battleground for King Ghidorah, Godzilla, Mothra, and friends (if you can call them friends). It was the beginning of a beautiful friendship between father and son, although, unsurprisingly to me, many of the action figures were battered or broken (Dylan always seemed taken aback). They watched all the movies, then American 1950s science fiction monster movies. The Monster Kid discovered Ultraman, and a new obsession was born. We all discovered (or rediscovered) the coolness of Ray Harryhausen and stop-motion animation. Kaiju and giant robots appeared in the Monster Kid’s drawings and stories. I still have the piece of paper on which he wrote, for the first time, “Godzilla” (the letter z is backwards). Other creatures and characters have come and gone (although Harry Potter has had some considerable staying power), but the kaiju are always there. With the release of Pacific Rim, the collecting kicked up a notch, and interest in creating stop-motion videos caught on (it’s possible that our family is the only one in town to consider Pacific Rim a family film). Before he died, Dylan was building paper-mache mountains, painting models, and going through spray paint at an alarming rate. And for the first time he decided it would be fun to go to a fan convention. He and the Monster Kid were very excited about the movie they were making (the story was never actually written down) and going to the convention. We planned to go as a family. And even though Dylan couldn’t be there with us, we went to G-Fest.

I have to say that going to G-Fest really put fandom in perspective. We went to “Dojo Studios”, where fans were filming an original kaiju movie that they had been working on for something like five years. There was a life-size spaceship cockpit made, basically, out of cardboard, styrofoam, and spray paint. I saw the prices on some of the kaiju the Monster Kid has been playing with (and breaking) which bring a whole new meaning to what it meant for Dylan to bring out his collection for the kids to play with. I saw other kids who were as obsessed as the Monster Kid. I saw a lot of fathers and sons getting excited– in fact, there were several pairs in the costume contest (there were also mothers and sons, and brothers and sisters). It’s possible that this is the only time they get to be around other kids who love kaiju so much. And I saw the incredible font of information that my son possesses on the movies and monsters that populate the world of Japanese fantasy film.

I want to thank the organizers of G-Fest for making it possible for us to come this year, the fans I encountered who were pleasant, generous, and compassionate, and my non-fan friends who gave up vacation time so we could go. Kaiju lovers, and their friends and families, really are the best.

 

 

 

Posted on July 15, 2014 by , Reply

We’re In The News!

Yes, really, we’re in the news! Okay, it’s just our community newspaper, but they wrote a really nice article about Monster Librarian. If you’re visiting here because you read it, thanks for stopping by, and please visit again, soon!  We may have a short summer hiatus next week, but then we will definitely be back on track.

img004

It’s true, we are plotting to get horror fiction into the hands of readers everywhere– Current in Carmel, June 3, 2014, p. 17

That lovely lady sitting between me and Dylan (we’re the ones holding hands) is Rhonda Rettig, who reviewed for us enthusiastically for several years before stepping down. Unfortunately, because this is a website, and because our reviewers are from all over the place, there aren’t very many photos of us together.

It’s exciting to see Monster Librarian get some recognition in our own community. Maybe this will even turn up some people who want to review children’s books for us– that’s always a huge challenge here. Yay!

 

 

Posted on June 4, 2014 by , Reply

The Original Monster Librarian

In Memoriam: Dylan Kowalewski, The Original Monster Librarian

September 5, 1973-April 17, 2014

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

 

Monster Librarian was the idea and passion of Dylan Kowalewski. Dylan, in a typical burst of optimism and energy, with an intense love of horror fiction, started the site at the end of 2005. Where he got the energy and conviction to start it off less than three months after our first child was born, while working full time and attending library school, I do not have the slightest idea. Library school was an eye-opening experience for him, as over and over again he ran into librarians or soon-to-be-librarians who told him they didn’t like horror fiction, didn’t want to read it, and didn’t know what to hand readers who asked for “something like Stephen King.” He was tired of going to bookstores and finding only the same three or four authors in the “horror” section. Anne Rice and Stephen King were just the tip of the iceberg, but you would never know that from looking there.

Dylan himself grew up down the street from a used bookstore called “Granny’s Attic”. Remember used bookstores? I do. The one I frequented at that age was run by a guy with a beard and a very sneaky cat, with shelves of yellow-spined DAW paperbacks. Dylan’s, apparently, was stocked with killer animal (and killer plant) books from the 1970s and 1980s. As we cleared out the bookshelves in his basement study so new carpet could be installed, he let go of a lot of books, but Guy N. Smith’s Crabs books, James Herbert’s The Rats, and many other well-worn paperbacks stayed.

While I’m not actually working in a library anymore, I do have the degree, and I’ve been a children’s librarian in a public library, a school librarian in an elementary school. I’ve also had plenty of anecdotal experiences in which I’ve run into people who were non-readers who became readers when they discovered Stephen King, or Alvin Schwartz’s Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, or R.L. Stine. I’ve seen all of these attacked by censors and belittled as trash reading or merely a stop on the way to “real” literature.  And I firmly believe that the world becomes a better place when people learn to read and to love reading. Dylan believed that too, and felt that a lot of kids, teens, and adults, were turned off to reading because the people who have the most influence– parents, teachers, and librarians– didn’t see the value of reading horror for pleasure. He always maintained that reading for entertainment is enough reason to read– there doesn’t have to be deeper meaning, and sometimes a tree really is just a tree.

And so he started Monster Librarian, writing short, objective reviews of just a few sentences, almost completely by himself, and publishing them every week, to create a resource for all those people (especially librarians) who told him “I don’t like reading horror, but I need to know about it”. For a long time that’s the only name by which people knew him. At a conference he attended, someone finally took him around and introduced him– “This is Dylan, the Monster Librarian”.  And he’s the only person who, I think, can ever own that title. At one point he worked full time, had a second job in a library, and put in probably the equivalent to a part-time job in time and effort for the site, as well as being a devoted and loving father and husband.

Most of the people who knew Dylan through Monster Librarian knew him mainly online, but both he and I have been lucky to have both authors and reviewers call us friends. This site became what it is because, in spite of his being an intensely private person, his personality and love of the genre and the horror community always shone through. Bret Jordan, Bob Freeman, David Agranoff, Rhonda Rettig (formerly Wilson), Erik Smith, Kelly Fann, Michele Lee, Colleen Wanglund, Darlene Wanglund, Dave Simms, Patricia O. Mathews, Diana Lord, Sheila Shedd, Hannah Kate, Lucy Lockley, Aaron Fletcher, Julie Adams, and so many more contributed to making this site what it is– a place where parents write to thank us for finding the right book for their reluctant reader, authors contact us to tell us that finding their book reviewed here convinced them to keep writing, small presses and self-publishers get their names out into the mainstream, Midwestern moms confess their love for horror, and librarians discover the gems of the horror genre.

The work of all these people has made the site a success.

But Dylan is the one who made it happen.

And to quote Amy Dalton,  his coworker from the Southport Library, “the only thing monstrous about the Monster Librarian was the size of his heart.”

 

If you have any memories or stories about your friendship or interactions with Dylan that you would like to share, feel free to email me at kirsten.kowalewski@monsterlibrarian.com.

 

 

Posted on April 26, 2014 by , 1 comment
First « 1234