Customer Reviews

The Haunted Playground (Shade Books)

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Shaun Tan, The Haunted Playground (Stone Arch Books, 1998)

First off: Shaun Tan rocks. We all know that now, thanks to The Arrival, which came out a couple of years ago, won pretty much every award known to man short of the Nobel Prize, and I think (but don't quote me) it may have even hit the New York Times bestseller list briefly. It is, quite simply, a great book. Too early to say, but I'm thinking it's destined for classic status (and will start hitting school curricula as soon as people figure out how to teach wordless graphic novels). What most of us on this side of the pond didn't know was that Shaun Tan had been quietly turning out work in his native Australia for a long, long time before that, work that got very limited release in America. It took me a couple of months after reading The Arrival to come up with a bibliography, and it's taken me a lot longer than that to find an avenue by which I can actually get my hands on some of these older books (my library dropped out of Worldcat last year, much to my dismay), but I think I've found a good dealer, and I can start getting a Shaun Tan fix regularly. Thank heaven for that.

The Haunted Playground is a very small book, balanced equally between text and Tan's trademark illustrations. The story itself is quite spare (Tan's writing, both here and in Tales of Outer Suburbia, reminds me a good deal of Caitlin Kiernan's), with just enough detail to fix the events in your mind, but the real draw here, of course, is the pictures. Tan's artwork has always seemed to me to be heavily influenced by the folks who drew for Twilight Zone: The Magazine, which was as notable for its distinctive illustrations as it was for the groundbreaking stories they routinely published. There's a bit of surrealism in there, a bit of "I'm influenced by collage but doing it by hand", and a whole lot of chiaroscuro and bleakness and claustrophobia. (Were he five to ten years older, he would have been a perfect artist for Gaiman's Sandman.) It shouldn't be a surprise that it works so well with Tan's tale here, which is exactly what the title tells you it is.

This is early work, and it has a kind of unformed feel to it. I mentioned the Kiernan angle before, but Kiernan is much more capable of coming up with an ending like this that's satisfying; with The Haunted Playground, you'll probably be left wanting to know what happened after the story ends, just as I was, but not in that overly-ambiguous sense one gets from Kiernan's best stories. Still, the illustrations almost make up for it, and if you're an established Tan fan, you obviously need to check this out. If you're not, start with The Arrival and Tales from Outer Suburbia before digging into the earlier work. *** ½

While Shaun Tan is graphically exquisite, he is not a writer. I think he should stick with his art work and let someone else do the writing. Made very little sense, left no message at all. Just my opinion, Judy Hogan