It makes you wonder just how early - and, indeed, how - taste is formed.
By good luck, I was exposed to Chris Van Allsburg at the ideal time - I must have been about nine or ten - and, while all of the ones I read (or possibly, had read to me by teachers?) caught my imagination, it was the especially dreamlike and unexplained The Mysteries of Harris Burdick that most captivated me. The black and white illustrations with their suggestive captions, not to mention the metafictional framing that added to the mystery about the images' provenance and nature, were irresistible.
As a book - well, as a text or object at all - it was one of a kind, and it stayed with me over the years that followed, as a personal classic and totem.
So it's both surprising and a touch marvellous that this collection of very short stories, one for each image and each by a different author (although the introduction by Lemony Snicket plays the same games as the original in suggesting there is misdirection at play), so aptly captures the spirit and, yes, the mystery that inheres in both image and original fragments of words; each succeeds in getting something of the picture's essence without reducing or constraining it.
There's the sense of wonder and magic (child-like but, evidently, enduring) as well as the foreboding and the sinister, sprinkled through the stories, as well as a strong emotional charge running through several; Cory Doctorow's "Another Place, Another Time" and Kate DiCamillo's "The Third-Floor Bedroom" stand out in that respect and are two of the highlights. Also particularly good, and more on the unnerving side, are Sherman Alexie's "A Strange Day in July" and M T Anderson's "Just Desert" (that last turned into an out and out nightmare of the existential - in the fullest sense - kind).
By good luck, I was exposed to Chris Van Allsburg at the ideal time - I must have been about nine or ten - and, while all of the ones I read (or possibly, had read to me by teachers?) caught my imagination, it was the especially dreamlike and unexplained The Mysteries of Harris Burdick that most captivated me. The black and white illustrations with their suggestive captions, not to mention the metafictional framing that added to the mystery about the images' provenance and nature, were irresistible.
As a book - well, as a text or object at all - it was one of a kind, and it stayed with me over the years that followed, as a personal classic and totem.
So it's both surprising and a touch marvellous that this collection of very short stories, one for each image and each by a different author (although the introduction by Lemony Snicket plays the same games as the original in suggesting there is misdirection at play), so aptly captures the spirit and, yes, the mystery that inheres in both image and original fragments of words; each succeeds in getting something of the picture's essence without reducing or constraining it.
There's the sense of wonder and magic (child-like but, evidently, enduring) as well as the foreboding and the sinister, sprinkled through the stories, as well as a strong emotional charge running through several; Cory Doctorow's "Another Place, Another Time" and Kate DiCamillo's "The Third-Floor Bedroom" stand out in that respect and are two of the highlights. Also particularly good, and more on the unnerving side, are Sherman Alexie's "A Strange Day in July" and M T Anderson's "Just Desert" (that last turned into an out and out nightmare of the existential - in the fullest sense - kind).
