Frankenstein: A Monstrous Parody
You end up reading a lot of books to your kids. Some of them are not very good. A lot of them are terrible licensed property tie-ins, but your kids love them, so you read them anyway. Some of them are amazing works of art that your kids don’t appreciate (Soda Pop by Barbro Lindgren), but you read them anyway too. A very small percentage of them end up being books you both enjoy and you read those over and over and over again. Madeline is one of those books. It’s a 1939 picture book by Ludwig Bemelmans about a Parisian boarding school and one little girl who is not afraid of tigers and, in the climax of the book, has her appendix removed. It has wonderful pictures combining a gorgeous sense of contemporary Paris and simple, expressive cartooning for the characters and a rhyming scheme that never quite congeals, likely due to the fact that Bemelmans was the son of a Belgian and a German who grew up speaking French in a part of Austria-Hungary that is now part of Italy before moving to Germany and then America in his teens. “He didn't speak any language without an accent,” his grandson, John Bemelmans Marciano, who continues to create Madeleine content to this day, told NPR on the book’s 75th anniversary in 2013. It’s a book that we read to our kids from a very young age and then they read to themselves once they could. But that’s not the book I look forward to reading with them every October. What I look forward to as the season turns creepy, neighbourhood trees casting long, wet shadows that thrash about in the wind under East Vancouver street lamps, is Frankenstein: A Monstrous Parody by Ludworst Bemonster, a collaborative pseudonym of Rick Walton and Nathan Hale. Instead of 12 little girls in two straight lines, Bemonster gives us “twelve ugly monsters in two crooked lines.” There’s a skeleton, a demon, a dragon, a zombie, a mummy, a pumpkin head, a werewolf, a vampire, a bride of Frankenstein, a gill creature, some kind of one-eyed alien who is clearly a cute version of the creatures from the Alien movies, and “the ugliest one was Frankenstein. ”The book is full of that gleeful mayhem and implied violence I love in Maurice Sendak and Jules Feiffer picture books. The monsters all wet their beds. The hospital staff that treats Frankenstein after his operation (where Madeline had her appendix removed, Frankenstein needs a new head) gets eaten, along with a pizza delivery boy, all off screen of course. And best of all, the parody nails Bemelmans’s odd cadence. “Did you know Frankenstein is a book that’s just like Madeleine but it’s the opposite?” asked my son, who was six when he said this but will be seven (same as his twin sister) by the time it’s published. “And instead of kids, it has monsters.” I loved monsters as a kid, the classics, especially Frankenstein and the Wolfman. I read every book on them I could find at the Saskatoon Public Library. But once I started watching horror movies, around the age of ten, mostly ’60s and ’70s British remakes, I wasn’t that impressed. I eventually realized that my idea of monsters wasn’t horror-based, it was comedy-based. I had first encountered Frankenstein, Dracula, the Wolfman, and all the rest, in their comic turns in the Abbott and Costello movies CFQC TV used to show on Saturday mornings once their meagre selection of cartoons was exhausted. The monsters in those movies were only scary to their victims, and to the stars, who—any child in 1984 could see—were clearly fools anyway. It turned out I wasn’t so much a horror fan, just a comedy fan.So that’s how my kids encounter the monsters of previous generations, too, not as nightmares but as spoofs. I don’t know if that better equips them to confront contemporary horrors, but if I had to choose, I’d rather listen to my kids laugh at the end of the day.
