Riggs wrote Tales of the Peculiar “for fans of the series who want to know more about the world,” he says. In one story, a girl discovers she can take away people’s nightmares in another, a beautiful princess with scales and a forked tongue spits venom at her enemies.
In a few, the peculiar child himself is the one acting foolishly and must slowly learn his lesson. In most of them, someone behaves cruelly toward a peculiar child because of his or her peculiarity, and that bad behavior is eventually, inventively, punished. On the surface, the stories are moral tales, bedtime stories designed to be read aloud. Encoded within their pages are the locations of hidden loops, the secret identities of certain important peculiars, and other information that could aid a peculiar’s survival in this hostile world.” The stories are not just folklore, he writes: “They are also the bearers of secret knowledge. In it, Nullings explains why he decided to edit and annotate this edition of the Tales. The foreword maintains this conceit: It’s written by Millard Nullings, the invisible boy at Miss Peregrine’s home.
Where you’d normally find the copyright details, instead there are instructions on things not to do while reading the book (whatever you do, don’t dog-ear the pages) and some unlikely production notes (“Printed in a nomad’s tent in the desert of Lop”).
The design of Tales of the Peculiar helps achieve this effect. Riggs says he wanted the new book to seem like an artifact from the peculiar world, an imaginary object that readers somehow discover in their real-world bookstores. Readers of the series, which includes two other bestselling novels, Hollow City and Library of Souls, will recognize that title: It’s the name of a book that the peculiar children consult for advice and comfort. We also talked about his new collection of short stories set in the same world, Tales of the Peculiar. Riggs, 37, spoke from his home in Los Angeles about the upcoming Tim Burton film adaptation of his dark YA fantasy debut, Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, a surprise 2011 hit that spent more than two years on the bestseller list. “Probably the most influential, and peculiar in her own way, was my grandmother.” A farmer’s daughter who became a farmer’s wife, she also went to university and was a teacher of Latin and French.
“I guess I had a lot of peculiar people in my life growing up,” says Ransom Riggs, author of the Miss Peregrine’s Peculiar Children series of novels.
0 kommentar(er)
