3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent book for fear-loving kids, April 12, 2009
This review is from: Tales of Terror from the Black Ship (Hardcover)
Monsters, blood, death, madness, doom, revenge, terror -- and pirates. What's not to like?
This book, though original, has a classic theme: it is a collection of macabre tales, connected by a frame story and a common motif, along the lines of Ray Bradbury's The Illustrated Man -- or, for the less literary, the Tales from the Crypt series or The Simpsons' Treehouse of Horror episodes. In most books like that, the frame story is little more than an excuse to put the stories together; but in this book, the frame is one of the most interesting parts.
The book begins with two young people, brother and sister, who live in an inn on a headland in Cornwall. The older sibling, the boy Ethan, is the narrator, and he recaps how he and his sister Cathy have gone from happy to miserable following the death of their mother and their father's descent into alcoholism. They are taken ill one evening, during a horrendous storm, and their father leaves the inn to find a doctor for them. Once he leaves there is a knock at the inn's door, and though the two children are alone -- the inn's custom has fallen off due to their father's inhospitable ways of late -- they cannot turn a man away into the storm raging outside, and they let him in.
He is Thackeray, a young-looking sailor who was knocked over the side of his ship by the weather (though there is more to Thackeray's story than at first appears), and somehow managed to make it to land and then to the lights of the inn. Cathy and Ethan give him a glass of rum and a place by the fire, and then, to pass the time until the storm eases, Thackeray tells them a story.
A gruesome story. A horrible story -- horrible in its content, that is, not in its composition. Thackeray apologizes at the end, for scaring such nice young people; but the two assure him that they were not unduly scared, and that whatever small frisson of terror they felt, it was most welcome. They are fans of Poe, you see, and their favorite pastime is to read aloud from his and similar tales of madness and death. In that case, Thackeray says -- he has more.
And he tells them all, nine stories all together, all of them about the sea, and the men who live and work on its savage beauty. The stories become more upsetting, both in the spiritually and mentally horrific sense, and in the viscerally gruesome sense, and after each one, Thackeray apologizes if he has gone too far; and after each one, Ethan is more and more convinced that he should never have let this mysterious stranger into the inn -- but Cathy is more and more entranced by each tale, and after each she asks for another. This leaves Ethan no choice but to poo-poo the idea that he was scared, in order to maintain his appearance of masculinity and guardianship over his sister. So at Cathy's urging, Thackeray goes on, with stories about sea monsters and demons, possession and destruction, madness and despair, and yes, pirates, until finally, the storm breaks and Thackeray leaves -- going back out to sea on the Black Ship that he came from.
At which point we learn that the most horrifying story of all is not one that Thackeray told to Ethan and Cathy, but rather the tale of the two children themselves.
It's a good book. The stories really are gruesome and macabre and effective, though they were canted a little bit young for me; the audience is definitely young adult. But I would have loved this book when I was ten or so. The illustrations are effective, as well, though the illustrator, David Roberts, has spent far too much time imitating Edward Gorey (Note that my fellow reviewer thought Gorey actually did the illustrations). Roberts's work is a near-perfect copy of Gorey's, with only a little stylistic variation on the human figures in the images; it is a style that fits the book as well as Gorey's would have -- but since the name on the book is Roberts and not Gorey, it was much too derivative for my taste. Again, a young adult would not be as picky as I, and would enjoy the pictures of Roberts as much as I've enjoyed the work of Edward Gorey. Overall it was a fun book to read, one that should be read aloud in a dark room on a stormy night, preferably near the raging sea.
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