Bunnicula Meets Edgar Allan Crow by James Howe

[lightreads]

Bunnicula Meets Edgar Allan Crow by James Howe




I was a bookish child. You’re all astonished, I know. But my access to books was extremely limited. This was, of course, before ebooks, so my options were to con someone into reading aloud to me (very limiting and not sustainable), trying to get something in Braille (very unlikely and extremely expensive), or hoping I could get an audiobook from my local library (usually abridged down to a third its proper length, and of course this was back before the audiobook industry actually existed in any meaningful way).



The National Library Service was my voice in the wilderness. They recorded books! Full length! And mailed them to me and let me read them for free! My mother ordered for me when I was very little, but I took over pretty fast – when I was seven or eight, maybe. The cassettes (and records, I am not kidding about this, I grew up in the 90’s and I still had to read books on vinyl) would come in the mail, in these distinctive snap plastic cases. I remember once I was hanging out with my best friend in second or third grade. We were having fun, doing kid things, and then the mail came, and there were books! Ten of them all at once that I’d never read before! (One of them was Jane Langton’s A Diamond in the window, which I would subsequently read roughly a biollionty times, I remember that very distinctly). And my friend was like, “so we’re going rollerblading, like we said?” And I was like, “no, I have books, you need to go home now,” and I kicked her out so I could read.



Anyway. The actual point is, the National Library Service is catching up with the twenty-first century ten or twelve years late, and digitizing the collection for download. Which means not only am I getting access to high-quality audiobooks again (I gave up on the cassettes years ago), but I’m also getting access to old favorites, read in the same old, loved voices. Certain passages of things I can mentally replay twenty years later, down to the last intonation.



The Bunnicula books are like that. I wore those tapes out. Harold the writerly dog, Chester the imaginatively paranoid cat. Bunnicula the vampire bunny, Howie the hapless puppy, all their misfortunes and adventures. That time Chester the Cat tried to steak Bunnicula with, you know, a steak. That time they all got boarded while the family was on vacation and there were so many shenanigans.



This is the last book in that series. I didn’t read it as a kid because it only came out in 2006. I downloaded it from the NLS today. I had oral surgery last week, and I’m having the sort of bad recovery that involves bad narcotics reactions, work emergencies, and torn stitches. (It’s a special moment when you find yourself frantically typing on your Blackberry as you spit blood into the sink in the bathroom at work. Oh, and there was that part where I had to walk 8 blocks post torn stitches because 3 cabs in a row illegally refused to serve me and my service dog. My loathing for my fellow man, it grows.) So I think getting this book comes from the same impulse that saw me making mac-&-cheese to painfully eat a few days ago. Comfort food.



And . . . aww. All of them. Chester’s wild theories, and Howie the puppy who is just so very dumb. One of the kids in the family wins a contest, and gets a visit from the author of his favorite scary books. And the story is about creativity, about where imagination comes from, and how that’s not always a good place. It’s funny in the kid slapstick way of these books, but a little sad around the edges, because it’s Harold’s last book. He’s getting old, you see.



I’m almost glad this one wasn’t around when I was eight. I would have read it again and again, I would have loved it, but I wouldn’t have understood it, not really. Not the Poe references, or the sadness.





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Comments

[lightreads]

I think I'll be going back to these, too, since it looks like I missed some other ones. They're younger than I usually read kidlit -- definitely aimed at the pre-puberty set. And I think some of them will hit my embarrassment squick in the way little kids books do sometimes because the adults behave so oddly. But Chester the cat!