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Musings: Drawing on the Walls: The Boy Who Drew Cats

The Boy Who Drew Cats adapted by Lafcadio Hearn and Margaret Hodges, and illustrated by Aki Sogabe

Holiday House, 2002

ISBN-13: 978-0823415946

Available:  Used hardcover and paperback, Audible audiobook

 

I had a reader request the name of a book about a little boy drawing all over the walls. The classic story about a boy drawing himself into a story is Harold and the Purple Crayon by Crockett Johnson, but that didn’t seem quite right. I finally remembered a Japanese folktale about a boy who drew all over the walls of a temple and drove a demon away, and was able to find what I think is really the answer to this question; it’s a story called “The Boy Who Drew Cats”, and it has been adapted and illustrated many times. The copy pictured above was adapted by Lafcadio Hearn and Margaret Hodges, and illustrated by Aki Sogabe, but there are MANY other versions.

The story follows a young man who is obsessed with drawing cats; he draws only cats, but he draws them amazingly well. Forced to leave home to find a trade, he spends the night in an abandoned temple, with empty screens all around, just begging to be painted with cats. After painting the walls, the boy falls asleep, waking in the night to hear a tremendous fight. In the morning, he discovers a terrible rat demon, dead, and notices the cats on the screens are not in the same positions he had painted them in. His cats have defeated the monster and saved his life, revealing his artistic ability and enabling him to become a professional artist.

Walls can be the source of creativity, as they are in the nonfiction picture book Painting for Peace in Ferguson, a story about the creative approach the community of Ferguson took to beautify  and inspire neighborhoods where the buildings had been boarded up or defaced following demonstrations against police brutality that turned violent. They can become a personification of insanity or paranoia, as they are in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper”, in which the protagonist has delusions of a trapped woman creeping behind the room’s wallpaper, or the whispers from her dead mother that one character hears in Amy Lukavics’ The Women in the Walls.

Walls can be an “in-between” place, as they are in Neil Gaiman’s The Wolves in the Walls and Coraline,  in which the main characters have to make choices about whether they will be passive or active participants in their own lives. If you are on the outside, walls can be a barrier you look to cross that conceal a treasure inside, as in The Secret Garden, and if you are on the inside they can be a trap– a haunted house that won’t let go, a locked-room mystery you can’t escape, like the inhabitants of the island in Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None. If you are the builder, like Hugh Crain in The Haunting of Hill House, you can make the walls be disorienting and disturbing to inhabitants to influence their minds, and if you want to keep people away, like Baba Yaga, you can decorate with human skulls.

Or you can follow your passion where it goes, and both protect and beautify the world by transforming walls into something new, like the boy who drew cats.

Book Review: Halloween Carnival, Volume 1 edited by Brian James Freeman

Halloween Carnival, Volume 1 edited by Brian James Freeman

Hydra, 2017

ISBN: 9780399182037

Available: Kindle edition

Halloween Carnival, Volume 1 is the first of five collections of five Halloween-themed stories, with each story by a different writer in the horror genre. Curated by Brian James Freeman, the short collections were published as individual ebooks in a series, with one releasing in consecutive order on each Tuesday in October of 2017.

Robert McCammon’s “Strange Candy” is a bittersweet ghost story. A father finds an odd piece of unwrapped candy is found in the bottom of his child’s candy bag, and when he doesn’t heed the kidding chides of his wife about eating tampered candy. and consumes it, he is visited by a spirit for each of the gnarled peppermint shaped fingers. Each one brings him urgent messages to deliver to the living. When he receives his own visit from a very human messenger, he knows what he must do.

Kevin Lucia’s “The Rage of Achilles, or When Mockingbirds Sing,” returns readers of his previous books to Clifton Heights. Father Ward volunteers to hear confessions on All Hallow’s Eve. The father of a dead boy apologizes for what he is about to do after delivering his story. Will Father Ward be too late to stop the distraught father, or is there something more to the events of this strange night?

In John R. Little’s “Demon Air”, Halle is headed to Australia on the cheapest flight possible. When the stewards and pilot get in on the Halloween fun, it seems like all fun and games, until the danger becomes too real on the long flight.

In Lisa Morton’s “La Hacienda de lost Muertos,” Trick McGrew, an old-time cowboy star of the silver screen, is thrown into a real ghost story when he walks onto the set of his new film in Mexico. He discovers the sad La Llorona, searching endlessly for her lost children, is more than just a legend. He also discovers the truth behind her death, and what became of her babies.

Everyone is using hashtags these days. What happens when someone takes it too far? That’s the question Mark Allen Gunnells poses in “#MakeHalloweenScaryAgain.” Dustin, an author working on his next novel, starts the infamous hashtag that will change the town he lives in forever. When journalist Shawn befriends the author, and the major suspect in a grisly chain of events, things get even stranger. The use of social media in this story adds to the intrigue the author sets. Who is using the author’s hashtag to drive his push to make Halloween scary again?

I enjoyed this short anthology very much. The stories are short, entertaining reads, especially appropriate for the most wonderful time of the year for those of us who love Halloween. “The Rage of Achilles” is a particular favourite. The story is subtle in its horror, and the author’s treatment of a child with autism is very real, well-written, and sensitive to the fact that not every person with autism has every single marker of the spectrum. Recommended.

Contains: some violence

Reviewed by Lizzy Walker

Book Review: Buffy: The High School Years: Parental Parasite by Kel McDonald, art by Yishan Li

Buffy: The High School Years: Parental Parasite by Kel McDonald, art by Yishan Li

Dark Horse Comics, 2017

ISBN: 9781506703046

Available: print, Kindle, and comiXology ebook

Into every generation, a slayer is born: one girl in all the world, a chosen one.

So begins the story of Buffy, Angel, Giles, Willow, and Xander chasing down a demon who possesses adults, driving them to only take care of it. The demon takes the form of an adorable young child, but it as we all know with demons in the Buffy-verse, it is anything but. At the same time, Buffy and her mother are struggling with their own mother-daughter relationship. Joyce wants to spend more time with Buffy, but the Slayer heeds the never-ending call to protect Sunnydale. However, when Joyce becomes hypnotized by the child demon, Buffy faces a new kind of battle—one to save her mother from the clutches of evil. Can Buffy and Scoobies defeat the demon before it kills Joyce?

This book is set during season 1 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and is the third installment of the Buffy the High School Years series. The artwork is great and very manga-ish. This is definitely a good supplemental YA title if you’re introducing your kids to the Buffy-verse. The relationship between Buffy and Joyce is depicted as strained, but they clearly love each other. Buffy’s devotion to her Slayer responsibilities is obsessive, which I seem to remember her desire to protect overrode her need for education or familial duties to her mother in the television series. Frankly, it made me want to revisit the series. Admittedly it has been quite some time since I’ve seen it. Pick this one up if you want to explore content set in the early years of the Slayer! You won’t be disappointed. Highly recommended for die-hard Buffy fans and newbies alike.

Reviewed by Lizzy Walker