Daily Bookshot: Pretty Monsters. Pretty Book

Pretty Monsters. Pretty Book, originally uploaded by Robert Burdock.

If I were looking for material to read around Halloween time, then it looks like this upcoming UK release from Canongate, Pretty Monsters by Kelly Link (published October 15th), may well fit the bill.

Gorgeously shrouded in its gothic Victorian-esque cover – the creation of killer graphic designer Will Staehle – Pretty Monsters is a collection of nine unique stories from the award-winning American author (Kelly’s official website), which all contain an element of the macabre. Here’s the publisher blurb:

Weird, wicked, spooky and delicious, PRETTY MONSTERS is a book of tall tales to keep you up all night. Blending fairytale, fantasy, horror, myth and mischief in a delicious cocktail, Kelly Link creates a world like no other, where ghosts of girlfriends past rub up against Scrabble-loving grandmothers with terrifying magic handbags, wizards sit alongside morbid babysitters, and we encounter a people-eating monster who claims to have a sense of humour. Combining the imaginative brilliance of Borges with the madcap escapades of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and more than a pinch of macabre humour, this is writing to come back from the dead for.

Although Pretty Monsters is aimed primarily at a Young Adult audience (YA), it has to be considered that this title will appeal to all ages. I remember getting out of my ‘comfort zone’ last year and reading Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book (Bloomsbury), and enjoying it immensely (you can read my afterthoughts HERE), and I envisage Pretty Monsters being on the same kind of ‘wavelength’ with regards to ‘audience appeal’.

Of course I’m not just making an unqualified guess that Pretty Monsters will appeal to all age groups. The book has been out in the US since October 2008 (published by Viking Children’s), and the general consensus seems to be that it does indeed have ‘across the board’ appeal, with people from all age groups raving about it.

Moving back to the aesthetics of the Pretty Monsters book itself, and aside from Staehle’s glorious cover work, there are a couple of other design elements I really like with this book. Firstly is the use of black on the edges of the pages, which not only complements the cover, but adds to the gothic feel. I can only think of one other fairly recent release that employs similar black-edged pages, and that’s the UK hardback edition of Chuck Palahniuk’s Snuff (Johnathon Cape). A completely different book of course, in terms of content, but in terms of design the use of black page edges are as equally as effective.

The second design element I like about Pretty Monsters is that all of the stories are fronted by a piece of illustrative artwork from Shaun Tan, the award-winning children’s book illustrator and author, which of course adds to the aesthetics and the appeal greatly.

So that’s Pretty Monsters, and I do indeed like the look of it, even before reading it. I said at the opening to this Daily Bookshot post that if I were looking for material to read around Halloween time, then this would be a perfect book for consideration. The fact is I am looking for material to read around Halloween time, because as I did last year with taking part in Memory of Stella Matutina’s excellent 31 Tales of Terror reading challenge, I intend to read 31 horror-flavoured short stories again this year, throughout the month of October, in the lead up to Halloween. And the nine stories found in Pretty Monsters look to offer a unique and wholly different starting point. So I have my first 9 of the 31. Expect to hear more on Pretty Monsters very soon.

Canongate Books | 15 October 2009 | £12.99 | HARDBACK | 389 PP | ISBN: 9781847677839