Hello! I was super excited to receive an advance copy of a chapter from Ransom Riggs' forthcoming novel, Tales of the Peculiar. It is going to be a sort of companion to the Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children trilogy. If you've read those books, then you've met the peculiar children: children who have some sort of supernatural feature. Maybe they're invisible, or levitate, or eat their supper with the mouth in the back of their head. They can also travel through time loops, and don't age. Tales of the Peculiar is half folktale collection/half history book, and tells of some of the first peculiars. It also gives hints as to the locations of other time loops, other than Miss Peregrine's.
The chapter that I got my hands on was "The Splendid Cannibals." Talk about shock factor! It's not every day that you read about cannibals so casually. The cannibals aren't the peculiars in this case, though: the villagers in Swampmuck are. They live happily, farming the swamps around their village. They work hard for a little money, only just enough to get by. Then one day some very wealthy cannibals come to the village, and everything changes. You see, it's a match made in heaven: Swampmuckians regenerate their limbs whenever they're lost (like a lizard can re-grow it's tail if it's bit off) and the cannibals are hungry.
Tales of the Peculiar has Riggs' expected excellent prose. As I was reading it, I could totally imagine that I was reading a history book (of a very strange-to-me society). There was just enough familiarity to the setting to make it believable... even though it was populated with people who could regrow limbs and others who ate those limbs! And if you've read the Miss Peregrine's Home trilogy, you'll know that one of the great features to those books is the antique photos of peculiar people; in Tales of the Peculiar we get pen-and-ink drawings by Andrew Davidson. They're gorgeous!
After reading this teaser chapter, I'm totally looking forward to requesting a full-length copy when it's released in September!
Wow, that sounds kind of macabre yet fascinating. I didn't even know this was coming out -- I'll have to keep an eye out for it!
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