Disposable Lit Reviews

Penguin Books, 1977/1993
no pp.
ISBN 014 05.4235 3

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Scab and Matter Custard
Snot and Bogey Pie,
Dead Dog’s Giblets
Green Cat’s Eye,
Spread it on Bread,
Spread it on thick
Wash it all down
With a Cup of Cold Sick.

I grew up in a very literate family in the middle of rural nowhere, and one of the shining moments of the month was the day that the Bookmobile pulled up outside our elementary school. (The school’s pitiful library had long ago been mined out for anything of interest.) My brother and sisters and I would all come home that night with ungodly stacks of books to last a month, and Mom and Dad encouraged these good habits, as any sane parent would.

But there was one book that tried even parental patience. Because we would get it out serially — one of us would return it, the next would immediately check it out. Mom thought it was incredibly disgusting and finally put her foot down and banned it from the house.

That book was Fungus the Bogeyman.

Raymond Briggs is an internationally successful children’s author, most of that coming from his heartwarming little book The Snowman, a wordless tale of a boy whose snowman comes to live in the night and has silly adventures with him. Part of the international appeal, obviously, is that a simple story told entirely with pictures needs no expensive translation work.

Fungus the Bogeyman is in many ways the antithesis to The Snowman. Dark instead of light, slimy’n'gross instead of sweet’n'airy, and incredibly wordy.

Fungus is, you may gather from the title, a Bogeyman — a member of a subterranean race of humanoids who live a life of dark dreary depression, which is just what they like. Fungus lives with his wife and child in a fetid, slimy house, with snails cultivated in the bedsheets, rotten eggs and Flaked Corns for breakfast, clothes-storage “waterobes.” His occupation as a Bogeyman is to journey up to the “topside” world by night and go through a routine of annoyance and disquiet, rattling garbage cans and waking sleeping babies. (You know, all the things that a Bogeyman would do.) Plus that most useful of Bogey talents, the engendering of boils on the backs of necks.

But Fungus is even more introspective than the average Bogey, and he’s starting to question the meaning of his life. Call it a midlife crisis, if you will. Even as he’s making ominous creaking noises on stairs and scaring poor vicars in churchyards, he’s wondering, “What’s it all for?” Surely, he thinks, his activities aren’t really benefiting the “drycleaners” who live on the surface, and they’re not all that productive in his own life; is there any purpose at all to the treadmill of his life?

That’s the plot, such as it is. But no schoolkid ever giggled over Fungus the Bogeyman because of the plot. It’s all the snot’n'booger stuff that makes it a classic.

Briggs has filled almost every page with small hideous details and truly colossal amounts of background information of Bogey life, from small footnotes for almost every speech balloon to long paragraphs of historical and sociological commentary. In fact, some pages end up being almost three-quarters filled with blocks of expository information, while the storyline continues in a meager panel. From the slimy bicycles the non-industrial Bogeys use to ride to work (complete with fungus growing on the seat), to the contents of the Bogey public library, to Bogey gardening, to some facets of Bogey biology that are best left unexplored, the book is a treatise on an entire milieu that Briggs obviously had percolating in the darker corners of his mind for some time.

Like all the best “children’s” books, it only gets better with the reader’s age. Younger children can skip the mini-essays and squeal with forbidden delight at the almost palpable textures of the book; older readers can appreciate Briggs’ constant use of intentionally misquoted literary references and the sly commentary on the lower middle-class English lifestyle that Bogeydom uncannily resembles. It’s a heady book, overflowing with details to be noticed on each reading.

And now that I’m grown, with a house of my own, my mom can’t do anything about my treasured copy.

Nathan Shumate