More Grizzly Tales for Gruesome Kids
More Grizzly Tales for Gruesome Kids is a 2001 children's horror short-story collection from Scholastic UK by British author Jamie Rix and is the fourth book in the Grizzly Tales for Gruesome Kids book series. It was the first book to be written after the Grizzly Tales for Gruesome Kids cartoon adaptation by ITV, which aired on CITV. It was also the last book in the original book series before it was retooled in 2007 as Grizzly Tales: Cautionary Tales for Lovers of Squeam!, and is the book with the most stories at twenty, whereas the first and second had fifteen, the third had sixteen, and the rest that would later follow had six.
| Author | Jamie Rix |
|---|---|
| Audio read by | Bill Wallis |
| Cover artist | Honeycomb Animation |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Series | Grizzly Tales for Gruesome Kids |
Release number | 4 |
| Genre | Children's horror |
| Publisher | Scholastic UK (Hippo) |
Publication date | 19 January 2001 |
| Media type | Print (Paperback) |
| Pages | 304 |
| ISBN | 9780439998185 |
| OCLC | 45853994 |
| Preceded by | Fearsome Tales for Fiendish Kids |
| Followed by | Nasty Little Beasts |
Synopsis
Knock Down Ginger
Entomologist Mr Thrips is a pariah in the town of Nimby. He lives in one of the richest private streets (described as a "millionaire's row") next to people who drive Mercedes-Benz, Jeep and Jaguar cars, sharing a home full of several insect species which made his house look unkempt and creepy. Residents despised him for allowing the street to look uneven and nicknamed the house "Bug City Central", so his neighbours, the Pie family, become determined to get rid of him. At a council meeting, Amelia Pie terrifies the audience with her fears of Thrips' behaviour giving Nimby a bad reputation, which is heightened when Colonel Dithering claims that termites can eat houses. As the audience panics over their eaten houses disallowing them to park their cars and have cocktail parties, Amelia boasts that her son will be the person that will successfully scare Thrips out of town.
Ginger Pie and his friend "Mad" Milo has already been bullying Thrips through vandalising his front garden and writing/yelling insults through his letter box. Milo's lisping sister Liza does not understand why the two boys relish in targeting an innocent old man but she is usually ignored, and Milo spitefully reveals Liza's nickname "Lizzie the Lizard" through reverse psychology. Ginger echoes the town's sentiments and calls Thrips ugly, claiming he looks a lot like the insects he shares his house with, to which Liza points out Ginger's pale skin and pale, red hair, and says "you look like Dracula just drank your blood." Ginger spots Thrips gardening and crosses the road to call him an "insect maniac", but he is terrified when Thrips scolds him in a tranquil fury without turning around to look at him. Milo later suggests that Thrips has literal eyes in the back of his head but Ginger adamantly replies that Thrips might be an insect humanoid, adding that they need to get him out of Nimby. Luckily, his mother already endorses the idea so he and Milo decide to make Thrips' stay uncomfortable by playing Knock Down Ginger. The boys calculate the length of time it takes for Thrips to get out of his armchair to answer the front door as ten minutes, and play Knock Down Ginger all day. Then Ginger jumps over the fence into the back garden to destroy Thrips' giant termite mounds but stops when he feels vibrations from the mud. Suddenly, Thrips appears in the kitchen and Ginger rushes back to the front door to take his turn at the doorbell. The door shoots open and Thrips drags Ginger inside.
Thrips threatens Ginger that he will retaliate just as horribly if Ginger refuses to stop with his pranks but Ginger is distracted: insects pattern the walls and fly around the room, and he can feel some land all over his body. He agrees to stop and hears the humming vibrations that he heard from the termite mounds. He opens an opposite door to find a levitating chair, assuming that he had walked in on a magic trick but Thrips explains that his termites are eating the wood inside so fast that it is creating a hovering illusion. He snaps his fingers and the chair disintegrates onto the floor. When Ginger leaves, he warns Milo and Liza that Thrips is not impressed with their behaviour but Milo scoffs at Ginger's sudden reluctance, accusing him and Liza of overreacting as he stomps to the door. Ginger pushes him and his sister out of the way and presses the doorbell. 30 minutes later, despite ringing the bell continuously, there was still no response and a bored Ginger walked home. He checks his pockets for the house keys and presses the doorbell, which makes the ground gradually shake to the sound of high whistling. By the time Ginger realised what was happening, Thrips' termites had eaten through his shoes and the rest of his body. Amelia opens the door to see a wide-eyed, statue-like Ginger, who disintegrates into sawdust when she touches him. She slams the front door to grab a telephone and the house collapses around her. On the other side of the road, Thrips' termites sleep peacefully after their enormous dinner.
The Upset Stomach
Ethel Turnip enjoys eating to the point of it being a hobby. She notices an article in the newspaper about a Yorkshire farm that breeds animal stomachs and demands that her parents get her one for a Christmas present as she stands on the kitchen table. When her parents hesitate, Ethel promises to look after it like a pet and she will use it a "second stomach" for herself; she will even call it "Rover". A smelly, gurgling parcel arrives two weeks later with a stomach as big as a basketball, spraying stomach acid that landed on the tablecloth, making it dissolve smokily. Although Ethel regrets the decision, she is grateful that it does as she wants at the Christmas dinner, but Rover the stomach is a needy nuisance that always follows her around the house and wakes her up at night, and whenever she takes the stomach out for a walk, children will cackle until their clothes fell apart. After leaving the stomach in a kennel overnight, Ethel is forced to take the stomach out to walk again to warm it up (only because her father threatened to never serve her oven chips otherwise), so she attempts to abandon it in a park. Unfortunately for her, a policeman returns the stomach home.
Furious, Ethel wakes up early the next morning and stuffs Rover into six plastic bags. She travels to the countryside by bus to throw Rover into a cow herd, telling her parents that Rover died when she returns home. Rover goes on a vengeful rampage and eats everything in the countryside, and continues eating until it arrives home. Rover grows until the Prime Minister sends the British Army out with tanks but the stomach acid melts them, and is dubbed "The Killer Stomach" on the six o'clock news. The Turnip family meet the giant stomach outside their house and Ethel orders Rover to leave, but the stomach ignores her. Mr Turnip notices the rumbling and goes inside to get indigestion tablets, returning to find Rover rolling away and his daughter missing. Violent bubbling is heard and the stomach explodes across the street, and an undigested Ethel is launched through her bedroom window. She is never greedy again, mostly because she can never enjoy food again—floating in Rover's insides has damaged her sense of smell, making everything she ever eats taste offal.
The Gas Man Cometh
The first noise Stefan Krott ever hears in his life is the telephone that rings in the delivery room and it started an obsession with telephones. His parents buy him a toy telephone but he soon grows bored with it and would take the cordless phone to play with, annoying his parents and the people he dials. His favourite phone calls are prank calls and frequently does them to emergency services, alerting the police to a bugler and the RSPCA to a pelican crossing the road. When his parents remove his access to telephones, he buys a mobile and continued, pretending to be Michael Caine to dinner ladies and telling a school janitor that an escaped horse is in the gymnasium.
At nine-years-old, Mr Stinky calls his mobile, so Stefan uses his hygiene comedy routine on him until Stinky hangs up, but during another prank call much later, a voice briefly intersects the call and threatens, "Stefan, we've got your number." He finishes his prank call and hangs up, but the phone rings immediately. It is the threatening voice, calling themselves the Gas Man, offering to sell him helium that can change voices when inhaled. Stefan accepts the offer, excited to finally cheat his way into impersonating the Queen, and skips school the next day to wait for the delivery after his parents went to work. At 12:10pm, two men in suits and sunglasses arrive with a man dressed in a boilersuit and baseball cap holding a gas cylinder—the Gas Man with his two bodyguards. Stefan offers to pay but the Gas Man gives the gas cylinder to him for free and leads the bodyguards out of the house.
Stefan reads the instructions thoroughly and rushes to the phone, using the helium every few minutes and speaking whenever the high-pitched vocals began. Every person he called is completely fooled and his belly hurt from suppressing laughter. When he finishes telling a man that he will be sent to the Tower, he realises that he has floated into space and grabs onto a satellite. His phone rings and the caller snaps, "Game over! You lose!" The phone deactivates.
The Urban Fox
One morning, Lord and Lady Blunderbuss move into a busy council estate with their six horses and many beagles. The next day, they invite themselves inside the house of Mr and Mrs Smith, offering to befriend them. Although they are surprised that the elderly couple have no servants nor know any nearby bear-baiting clubs, it seems to be an ulterior motive to spy around the house, and they discover Mr and Mrs Smith's daughter, Parker, and her pet fox eating breakfast in the kitchen. The Blunderbuss couple declare that they will get rid of the fox for their neighbours (despite Parker and her parents protesting that their fox, Elvis, is an honorary family member) because a civilised society has no place for foxes. 30 minutes later, a bugle blares outside and the Smith family discover that the Blunderbuss couple had assembled their fox hunting team. Parker tells her parents not to panic and Elvis prepares to outwit his enemy.
The horses and beagles jump over the back garden fences as if they were hurdles as Elvis takes turns in different gardens disguising himself as garden ornaments, such as a bird bath, a satellite dish, a sunbather, a fishing gnome, and a croquet hoop. It tires the hunt to the point of Lord and Lady Blunderbuss agreeing that life in the city is not to their liking, so they gather their exhausted army with their belongings and move out. A street party is thrown in Elvis' honour where the neighbours express their gratitude to the Urban Fox. Meanwhile, the Blunderbuss couple have fled to Scotland to escape from the police, who pens them a letter ordering them to pay for property damage.
Spoilsport
The Pinchguts are a mean family. They live in a horrible-looking house that they refuse to tend to and the parents are so mean that they name their children Girl and Baby. Baby is the anomaly whereas Girl loves ruining people's happiness by destroying their fantasies: once, she forcibly shut a ventriloquist's mouth to prove that the dummy was not magical and she revealed Baby's birthday presents before he opened them. One evening, Baby's milk tooth falls out during dinner and he gushes that he was going to get money from The Tooth Fairy. Girl snaps that fairies are not real, but when Baby finds money under his pillow the next morning, Girl insists that it was their parents. Ma and Pa are confused.
In the middle of fighting a bacteria army attempting to climb the toothy castle walls, The Tooth Fairy is played a recording of Girl declaring that fairies are not real by a gum goblin, Head of Intelligence. Excited, she and her team create a plan to avenge the non-believer. At the Pinchguts' home, Baby had not stopped crying so Ma and Pa locked him in the back garden to sleep off the misery in the dog kennel. Girl is delighted as she settled into bed but wakes up to her mouth being clamped open by dental equipment and someone's voice rummaging around her teeth. The voice groans at Girl's jolting freak-out, claiming that they nearly take the tonsils, and a tooth flies out of Girl's mouth. The Tooth Fairy follows, scolding Girl's scepticism and produces a pneumatic drill, making Girl faint. In the morning, Girl has no teeth. Her parents show no sympathy and make jokes at her expense about dentures, whereas Baby—still in the garden—bounced around, vindicated.
Girl leaves the house and gives an elderly dog a bone that breaks out a tooth, which she left under her pillow to be collected. Despite her team assuming it to be a trap, The Tooth Fairy arrives in Girl's bedroom. Girl grabs her, armed with a slipper, and demands to be taken to her castle to get her teeth back. The Tooth Fairy explains that Girl's teeth are durable enough for her castle to be repaired but she obeys. The Tooth Fairy's team reluctantly hand back Girl's teeth just as the bacteria army reappear. The leader spots Girl's teeth (now back in her mouth) and his army attack, leaving a brown sludge puddle behind.
Girl's remains are returned to her family and she is buried in a fizzy drink bottle. Ma and Pa are thrilled because they save money on a coffin and Baby is excited about his next tooth loss. When the Tooth Fairy arrived to collect his next tooth sometime later, he tells her to send his love to Father Christmas, leprechauns, the Easter Bunny, the stork that delivers babies, and the Yeti; she later does.
Dirty Bertie
Mr and Mrs Barf always laugh at their surname because it sounds like "bath", and because they are the cleanest people around, having three baths a day and basing their married life on the phrase "Cleanliness is next to godliness", hoping that being clean and having a dust-free house will get them into Heaven. Meanwhile, their son, Bertie, is always filthy with food stuck to his clothes. The only time he cares about being clean is when he uses his toothbrush to clean the soles of his trainers. When his father asks him to bathe, Bertie refuses because it will drown the insects living in his hair, so his parents try to clean him as he sleeps, but they are caught by Bertie's homemade booby traps.
Most boys love being dirty, but Bertie believes they are cowards because they fail to maintain it. When his parents lose their patience, he tells them that he wants a career in this "profession"; an astronaut, he decides, after being pressured into an answer. He leaves his parents astounded and goes into the back garden to build a rocket out of anything he can find. As he plays pretend and hunts for aliens, his parents decide to shock Bertie into having a bath by writing a Lonely hearts ad for a girlfriend. The next Saturday, five girls arrive on the doorstep but they are either terrified of Bertie's filth or Bertie is terrified of them — the fifth girl never knocks the front door because she sees the fourth vomiting in a hedge.
The sixth customer is a Bertie clone, who then turns into an alligator-kangaroo-blobby hybrid. This is PygAlien, who has escaped from the planet Tharg because he has accidentally kissed a 900-year-old hag in a discotheque, and crashes his spaceship. Due to Bertie's body odour, Pyg wants to borrow his rocket to get back home, because Bertie smells like an astronaut. As the two of them go to the garden with Bertie protesting that he is not a real astronaut, the front door bursts off its hinges and lands on Mr and Mr Barf as a wrinkled, long-nosed alien in makeup enters with two walruses in suits looking for Pyg. In the garden shed, Pyg becomes frustrated because Bertie is refusing to show him how the rocket works and knows that Putrid the long-nosed alien is in hot pursuit with her brothers. The shed opens and Putrid enters. She spots Bertie and decides that she prefers him to Pyg because she likes his looks and his smell. The walruses grab Bertie and they all leave for home to get married. Back on Earth, Pyg is living happily ever after with Mr and Mrs Barf as a cleaner Bertie Barf.
The People Potter
In Worcester, 1777, a group of children were playing with a pig's bladder and accidentally launched it through the window of Josiah Reeks the potter's workshop, destroying a career's worth of hard work. He caught them attempting to escape with the pig's bladder and reappeared from his workshop three days later with twelve life-size porcelain statues. This story is known as the legend of The People Potter.
In the present day, there is Greta Gawky, a clumsy girl who is 2 m (6 ft 7 in) tall. She once went fishing with her father and cast her hook so wildly that a car swung itself into the river after her hook dragged off its handbrake. Children jeer "Lawks, it's Gawks!" when she walks into a classroom before she can knock the blackboard off the wall, and she once slapped a dog up a tree when she tried to pet it. Because of her accident-proneness, Greta's parents have hidden a Ming vase behind wellington boots that they hope Greta will never touch again: at nine years-old, it fell on the dog and broke two ribs, then she nearly melted it with a candle, then she burnt her parents' homemade protecting cage, and then her head got stuck in it when she (and the toilet) crashed through the ceiling. Her parents had warned her that if she ever touches the vase again, she will become a celery-eating maid in a Clapham Common mansion while they are sold into slavery in Marrakesh. Greta hates celery, so she obeys the best she can.
To celebrate, Greta is given a tiny porcelain figure of Josiah Reeks. Greta assumes he is a waiter, at first, and her parents gleefully tell her about the People Potter legend. As they cackle, Greta becomes uncomfortable with the figure, particularly after reading a little message on its side that says "I'm coming back from China" if it breaks. This makes her even clumsier than usual—especially when she is the same room with it, feeling the character's eyes watching everything—and during one messy morning, her parents leave with orders to clean the house by the time they return. Greta's cardigan button has fallen off in the commotion and she rushes around to look for it, falling down the stairs and crashing through the floor into the cellar, and then destroying a pipe she tries to climb up and being sprayed through the hole and through the ceiling to the bathroom. Determined to save the Ming vase, Greta attempts to get back to the hallway to check it was still intact by the wellington boots, but it causes a domino effect of destruction through different rooms until the house collapses, save herself and the front door, whereas the Josiah Reeks figure is in pieces. The front door opens to reveal the real Josiah Reeks with a potter's wheel. Later, Greta's parents arrive home with nowhere to live and find a porcelain statue of their daughter. The Ming vase is still intact, however.
It's Only a Game, Sport!
According to the disclaimer, this story was once told by an Australian bushman after drinking six amber nectars. It is about a schoolboy named Bruce, the son of the most famous and successful athletics couple in Australian history, who fails at every sport he touched. He easily loses his temper and will immediately turn to sabotage and excuses. "It's only a game, sport!" his tennis umpire Games teacher groans when Bruce begs him not to announce the current score, so Bruce bites his leg.
His parents Shane and Sheila, who have both long retired from sports, encourage the behaviour to the fullest. From birth, they teach him that losing is not an option, even if he has to cheat. When Bruce loses an Egg-and-spoon race with a broom as a partner on Sports Day, they order him to steal the hammer from the hammer throwing area and attack the winners. Bruce is later banned from participating in sports, and then expelled after the school burns down. Bruce has to stay at home because other schools refuse to teach him, so Bruce uses his free time to invent his own games to play against his younger sister, Kitty, and changes the equipment and/or rules so that he will win all the time.
Kitty is not good at sports either but she has a large interest in nature, so her bigger and aggressive brother had an advantage on top of his sabotaging: after winning boxing and basketball, they play "Bush Snooker" with hedgehogs for balls and aim them at kangaroos, but Bruce will untie the kangaroos when it is Kitty's turn so they will hop away. During Trivial Barbeques, Bruce gives his sister the difficult questions. At bedtime, he demands that they race to be the first one in bed and then puts a spider in Kitty's pyjamas. Kitty tolerates the behaviour but she loathed Bruce's threats and his boasts, and the name-calling. She suggests that they play Snakes and Ladders and her successful dice rolls put her far in the lead. Bruce's frustration turns him back into a stubborn sore loser who demands that the rules should be changed: ladders send players down and snakes send players up. Kitty agrees and continues winning whereas Bruce reaches the top of a ladder. Bruce insists that the rules should be changed back to normal and accuses her of cheating. He picks up the playing board and throws it out of the house, tripping over the pet koala in the doorway, stumbling over the balcony ladder and falling towards a group of excited snakes.
Fast Food
An ambulance carrying a patient in a critical condition has just left the scene of a hit and run. A policeman also travelling with them asks for the patient's side of the story. The patient explains that he saw a car and tried to eat it because he wanted to eat fast food like the rest of the world. The policeman points out that a car is too big to be eaten and the patient admits that he realised before it hit him and looked tinier when it was further away. The paramedics try to move the policeman out of their way so they can inject the patient but the policeman insists that he needs the answers to "save lives". The patient dies, revealed to be a flattened hedgehog.
Sock Shock
Nick loves being the different child: he never wears shoes, wears his hats inside out, and ignores emergency signs in the street. When he waits for his socks to be cleaned one day, the washing machine temporarily freezes. Once the washing finishes, he opens the door and discovers that one of his socks have disappeared. He calls the police and prints out missing posters; no fingerprints are inside the machine. Nick is kidnapped by forty long fingers and dragged inside the washing machine, travelling through the waste disposal pipes and landing in a smelly cave. A match lights a hurricane lamp, revealing a scaly goblin with bulging eyes and sharp teeth. The light also reveals several tiny holes in the walls surrounding them, leading to every washing machine in the world. Nick assumes that the goblin intends to kill him but the goblin denies the thought — the socks he collects are used for injured worms as sleeping bags and the patients insist on different-coloured beds; Nick is a false alarm that he has kidnapped by mistake, thinking he has missed a sock. He puts on makeup and leaves to film an interview for a documentary, telling Nick that he can go back home the same way he came. Now that there was no entity that will be waiting to avenge Nick for wanting to be different, he still never wears shoes.
Revenge Of The Bogeyman
"Digger" Dee always picks her nose wherever she goes. Her parents are disgusted — they want a nice, polite girl, not a girl who behaves like a rowdy little boy — so her father yells that if she digs far enough into her nostrils she might pull out the Bogeyman. Dee is terrified at the thought but she picks her nose so much that her hand will continue to, without being prompted, as she sleeps.
One night, a voice wakes her up, ordering her to dig deeper. She looks around her bedroom and the bathroom but finds no one watching her and picks her nose again, pulling out a Yorkshire pudding-looking creature with limbs and a warty face, holding a pickaxe. He is the Bogeyman and is furious that Dee has evicted him from his home. "Just because we're small and easily flicked doesn't mean that bogeys don't have feelings too," he snaps, before eating her.
Dee travels through the Bogeyman's digestive system, sliding through tunnels and landing in caves. A finger pulls her out, belonging to a giant, who flicks her against the wall. Then a giantess steps on her and kicks her across the room into a dog bowl. As she tries to run away, she is found by the giants' son who attempts to eat her, but spits her out in disgust. She lands in the arms of the Bogeyman and promises to never pick her nose again. The Bogeyman is delighted and crawls back into her nose. Dee has kept her promise, but the temptation is too strong so she compensates with ear-picking instead. Unfortunately, she is in danger of pulling out The Waxwoman, who is worse!
Crocodile Tears
Mr and Mrs Howling cry easily. Mr Howling will cry for joy and pride, and Mrs Howling will cry in fear about any negative thought in her mind. Their daughter Gwendolyn exploits this by pretending to cry to get away with not doing homework, getting new outfits, eating fast food, watching the television, and her parents always believe her. One Christmas, one of her forced tears turn into a tear-sized duck, who warns her that Sakusaki the Old Croc—the father of crocodiles — will get her. It opens its bill and a glass tear falls out, showing Gwendolyn's face. Gwendolyn is not convinced and tells the duck that she has heard the story before, but becomes worried when her parents take her out to see a pantomime based on Peter Pan and does not decide to cry but throw tantrums instead, embarrassing her parents as she fights with audience members in queues and screams until her parents buy her a programme and the merchandise outside the theatre. Noticing surrounding customers looking irritated by her behaviour, she decides to cry to get some sympathy. Mr Howling gasps as he looks at Gwendolyn's eyes which has turned green. A giant tear falls out and turns into a giant crocodile, which eats her in front of her horrified parents and audience. The crocodile does an impression of Gwendolyn and wails that he ruined the evening. The audience applauds, assuming that it is part of the play, whereas Mr and Mrs Howling mournfully cry for a decade.
The Pie Man
From since he was born a few days ago, Donald always sucks his thumb, even as he sleeps. No one knows why and has numerous theories, but a midwife warns that The Pie Man might visit him he never stops. The Pie Man (also known as the Patty Man and Filo Fella) chops off the thumbs of thumb-sucking children and uses them to hold up his pies' pastry tops. As they leave the hospital, Donald's parents decide to stop him by pulling his hand away, but are unsuccessful because their son's mouth has a strong grip, so they tickle his nose as he sleeps and slides a dummy into his mouth before he sneezes. This later backfires as Donald grows up and sucks it everywhere he went and whenever it was taken away, Donald substitutes it for anything he can find, and has destroyed several objects in the living room, his parents tell their doctor. The doctor suggests trying to throw the dummy away but during the first attempt with Donald's father on rollerskates, Donald draws breath so hard that the dummy flies out of the bin and back into his mouth.
By eleven-years-old, Donald was still sucking his dummy and every person he walked past in the street stared. The family visits Loch Ness and show Donald the monster's alleged sighting, where his mother pulls Donald's dummy out with a monkey wrench and throws it into the loch. Donald jumps in to rescue it but retreats when he hears growling. As the family leave in the car for home, Donald is restless as his parents are still celebrating. He sticks a thumb into his mouth and is contented as his parents drive back, buy scuba diving equipment and dive into Loch Ness to find the dummy. Donald rejects the dummy because his thumb tastes better after all.
At home, a pie seller arrives at the front door. Donald's parents run to his bedroom door and order him not to suck his thumb as Donald watches the salesman from his bedroom window. The salesman travels up on the steam from the pies and Donald lets him in. An empty pie dish is taken out of the man's basket and asks for Donald's hands, but Donald refuses to stop sucking. The man tries to pull his hands away but they do not move. Donald gloats, making the man smirk, and Donald is pushed into the pie dish. Donald's parents break into the room and discover that their son is missing but a steaming pie is resting on the window ledge.
Bunny Boy
Bill hates vegetables to the point of making Tubs the neighbourhood rabbit sneak into the garden to feast on his mother's vegetable patch every night. His mother decides to stand guard with a shotgun which prevents her son Bill from leaving the garden gate open. The next morning, she serves him a freshly-grown cabbage for lunch. Bill paints it like a football and leaves it for the dog to bite, buries it and pretends that he has discovered a bomb with homemade signs, tells the police that he has found a decapitated head, but his mother will find the cabbage, wash it and place it in front of him again. Desperately, Bill snatches the cabbage and hides it under his anorak as he sneaks out of the house to find Tubs through Farmer Popple's cornfield. Bill rests by Tubs' rabbit hole as Tubs joined him to nap; a shadow casts over them as Popple's combine harvester runs them over.
Bill wakes up in hospital and is sent home the next day. Every vegetable his mother serves him he gleefully eats; he wakes up every morning with soil in his mouth after having a recurring dream about a rabbit eating everything in the garden. One day, Bill discovers that he has grown a fluffy tail and runs out of the bathroom to show his mother, discovering the doctor he had met in the hospital in the kitchen. "I knew this would happen," the doctor sighs, and explains that the combine harvester accident had mutilated Bill and Tubs so much that it was difficult for the surgeons to differentiate human and rabbit remains, therefore, Bill's rabbit instincts were predicted to develop at some point. Bill's mother demands that her son should be changed back but the doctor claims that it is impossible, as Bill uses his giant rabbit feet to kick open the back door and hops into the garden. He never returned home again, now living in a nearby burrow, only visiting the garden every night for dinner as he hears his mother's loud sobs.
Spit
A little boy spits on the pavement. He had actually spat on a giant's shoe, so the giant responds by spitting on him.
Superstitious Nonsense
Penelope Jane has legally changed her name to Pylon because "Jane" is Gaelic for "pie-shoveller". She is intensely paranoid, refusing to say (or be involved with) the number "six", shaking hands with the postman to receive positive letters, telling her mother to put on a shirt before her trousers to prevent ants, and reciting the alphabet backwards so that her clothes will stay clean. One day, her parents (Mr and Mrs Gaslamp) notice an alder tree in the garden, which her father attempts to pull out. Pylon claims that it is the sign of a witch as Mr Gaslamp successfully removes it and decides to divorce her parents for ignoring her.
After visiting the library the next day, Pylon lies to her parents that a vampire will attack her if she does her homework and that teachers cause insanity. Her parents agree to never send her back to school and give her all the money in their bank accounts. Pylon uses the money for a trip around the world and returns to her peasant parents demanding that they give her custody of the house because of an Incan belief she discovered in Peru. Mr and Mrs Gaslamp move out, leaving Pylon with everything.
On Friday 13th, Pylon prepares preventatives for her house. She panics when she realises that she has broken several of her own rules as she had walked to the shop, and breaks several more when she rectifies her mistakes. She drags a giant metal box into the garden and climbs inside to save herself, which is then crushed by a cow that fell out of the sky. Mr and Mrs Gaslamp move back into their home and install a plaque for her grave with a rhyme about how grateful they were she has gone.
Head in the Clouds
Brian the "Butterfly Brain" is always daydreaming, which makes him forgetful. The last time his parents will see him every morning would be at breakfast because they will have to look for him hours later when he has not returned home because he is lost somewhere in town. One afternoon, he accidentally walks a different direction and stops in a field with two kites flying in the sky above him. He pretends to be a kite as he runs down a hill but a strong wind trips him up, and he falls over, snapping his head from his neck and launching it into a tree. He can still feel his body as if it is still connected together but his toes can feel sensations from his mouth and eventually found his head resting on bracken.
Headless Brian leaves the field and walks through the town, holding his head by his side. He enters a store named The Body Shop where the shop assistant examines his head, discovering that Brian's head was full of clouds. The shop assistant offers Brian a choice between switching heads with an available spare or waiting an hour to clean out the head. Brian chooses the latter option and is given a red ticket and an irreplaceable silver key. Brian enters the waiting room and daydreams that he is Rapunzel and tosses his hair for his prince to climb, throwing the key and ticket out of a window. When the shop assistant calls him for collection, Brian's body cannot find his ticket, but the shop assistant is hesitant to give him his head's box, no matter how much Brian begs. The shop assistant allows Brian to take the box home to wait for the eyes to open so that he can unlock it, but Brian realises at home that he cannot find his key either. The eyes in his head open and flinch at the giant clouds surrounding his face.
When the Bed Bugs Bite
Hannibal loves the sound people make whenever he bites them. For nine years, he has bitten everything, from people to animals to objects, which has made his teeth sharpen into fangs. His embarrassed parents hope that he will change but Hannibal enjoys the attention he got and has chewed at their earlobes and removed some of their fingers. One evening, they confront him with a broken car headrest and a bill from the Natural History Museum to pay for teeth damage on T-Rex bones but Hannibal ignores them and eats it, so they send him to bed early and snap that they hope that the bed bugs bite him. Hannibal falls asleep, confused by his parents' threats, and has a nightmare about a giant "queen bug" flying through a busy street, touching children (including Hannibal) which makes them disappear; Hannibal is teleported to his bedroom where the queen bug is waiting, who drips black saliva over him that hardens like a cocoon.
Hannibal wakes up disturbed, but continues his biting behaviour throughout school time, and is later suspended after he bites the headmistress' bottom. His enamel begins to itch and the teeth bite at their own accord. When they bite through a lollipop lady's sign, she is hit by a truck and bounces onto the pavement, which gives the truck a huge dent, and stands up to check on Hannibal, feelers expose under her hat.
At home, an exterminator dressed in black on a motorbike arrives to remove the bed bugs from Hannibal's room. She prepares her vacuum cleaner and is directed to his bedroom. Hannibal is ordered to demonstrate how he sleeps. The exterminator pushes the vacuum cleaner through Hannibal's pyjamas and leaves once the rattling in her cleaner had disappeared. As Hannibal sleeps, insects from his pyjamas crawl around his body and bite into his flesh, as he has another nightmare about the queen bug dressed in black. In the morning, he terrifies his parents at breakfast and leaves for school, terrifying everyone he walks past, and causes the school playground to run amok. The headmistress yells for someone to contact an exterminator and Hannibal looks in a nearby window, discovering his reflection looking like a bed bug humanoid. A motorbike enters the playground, driven by the exterminator, who crushes him with a shoe. Faraway, an old lady, who lives in a block of ice between the Napashere's Land of Dreams and the Valley of Nightmares, presses the erase button on her answerphone.
The Decomposition of Delia Deathabridge
Delia is the daughter of Oxford University professors, so she refuses to participate in schoolwork and mocked students that obeyed. One day, her English class discover that their teacher is going to be absent for several weeks and has been replaced by the substitute teacher, Ms Whetstone. Delia fails to outwit her and is ordered to complete her homework as the rest of the class read. Delia declares that she has no need but Whetstone smugly suggests that Delia should be given homework more difficult. Delia reluctantly writes an essay—titled "My Worst Nightmare"—about a warty, bearded, big-footed beast breaking into her bedroom and turning her stupid, but stops in the middle of a sentence when the school bell rings.
At home, Delia abandons the essay and shoves the exercise book under her bed. As she slept, the book shoots across the floor and shakes, filling the air with foot odour. In the centrefold is a picture of a man with long fingernails, which moves and orders her to release him by finishing the story. Ms Whetstone is unimpressed when Delia claims that the beast she wrote about prevented her from finishing the essay and forces her to finish within the lesson. Delia quickly erases any negative adjectives and writes a happy ending that the now-friendly, wish-granting troll would disappear. Whetstone rejects the essay, believing that the twist ending does not work, and adds with a sadistic smirk that she will rewrite it for her; Delia faints.
The epilogue reveals that Delia returned to school the next day as a ditz but worse. It is revealed that Whetstone's rewrite was about a troll breaking into Delia's house and pushing his fingernails into her ears, bursting her brain lobes. Then he eats Delia's intelligence and leaves to write the Encyclopædia Britannica.
The Grass Monkey
Ten-year-old Spike has spiky hair, large ears and lives with his ill mother in a caravan. They own an underweight cow named Ruby but they do not live near a grassland so she cannot produce milk. One morning, Spike leaves for school but fails to shut the front door properly, and Ruby watches a brown-tailed creature sneak inside. When school is over, Spike goes to a hairdresser's to sweep trimmed hair off the floor. That day, a beautiful girl with blonde hair is the only customer, who shoos him away when he tries to sweep around her chair. She is Esmerelda who aspires to become a fashion model, preparing to enter the annual Miss Golden Locks competition with a £50 prize, a modelling audition, and a dedicated float in the summer parade. A lovestruck Spike offers her a mug of tea but she pushes it out of his hand, dampening his school trousers.
Her parents barge into the shop and scold her for disobeying them, which begins an argument as Esmerelda protests that she knows that she can trust the hairdressers to not damage her hair. Spike interrupts with a shriek as the hot tea soaks through to his legs so Esmerelda claims that she and Spike are in a relationship. Spike is confused but thrilled, and does not suspect Esmerdela's scheming. Before she is forced to leave with her parents, she asks him to steal shampoo and give it to her at home. Despite his hesitance, Spike takes a dozen shampoo bottles when Sandra the hairdresser is out of the room and stuffs them in a bin bag full of trimmed hair. When he arrives home, he showers and changes his clothes and covers his body with the hair, remembering when he overheard Esmerelda telling Sandra that she is attracted to hairy men. Suddenly, his mother stands by the front door and explains that a monkey-looking hobgoblin has visited her in the morning to grant her a wish. She shows him magical grass seeds to plant once a day but Spike is distracted and leaves to deliver the shampoo.
Esmerelda screams when she sees Spike, assuming he is a monkey, but claims that she saw rats when her parents catch her. Spike shows her the shampoo he brought but Esmerelda is furious because he had forgotten the Nowtincide shampoo and orders him to get it tomorrow otherwise she will lose the Miss Golden Locks competition. The next day, Spike is still guilty while his mother begs him to look at the fresh grass that Ruby was eating. After school, he arrives at the hairdresser's, discovering Sandra waiting for him at the front door to fire him. Esmerelda kicks him in the knee when he tells her that he cannot get any new shampoo for her. Spike runs home, steals the magic seeds and offers them to her. Esmerelda ignores his warning of eating one seed and eats everything out of the sack.
The next morning, Spike's mother is devastated that she cannot find her magic seeds and an excited Esmerelda knocks on the caravan door with her blonde hair now a train of grass. All she needs to do is dye it blonde, she explains, but grass grows rapidly out of her skin and covers her entire body. Ruby rushes towards her and eats her before Spike can react, but the magic seeds continues growing inside her stomachs, turning her fur into grass. She never produces milk again, but Spike and his mother became millionaires that travels the world, showing off Ruby the Mow Cow who appears in freak shows and television commercials.
Development
To both celebrate and promote the announcement of a cartoon adaptation of the book series, Rix created More Grizzly Tales. He had planned to develop said adaptation from since 1993 by using his producer credits from his production company Elephant to send Grizzly Tales for Gruesome Kids to numerous television studios.[1] Elephant and animation producers Honeycomb Animation were given a two-series deal with ITV studios with a budget over US$2.5 million for 30 episodes;[1] the cartoon would begin airing on the CITV timeslot in January 2000. The previous three books in the series were rereleased by Scholastic Books (apart from Fearsome Tales, which was owned by Hodder)[1] with the front covers re-designed by Honeycomb Animation, imitating the future screenshots of the cartoon.[2]
Publication history
This was the only book in the original series that did not have an illustrator, whereas the previous three's first editions had Bobbie Spargo (Grizzly Tales, Ghostly Tales)[3] and Ross Collins (Fearsome Tales).[4][5][6] The front cover was designed by Honeycomb Animation, the producers of the animated adaptation, in the style of the CITV series; the first series had just aired the year before in 2000.
The book is said to have officially gone out of print in 2010.[7] It was briefly available on Kindle in 2011, published by Orion.[8]
| Pub. date | Format | No. of pages | Publisher | Notes | ISBN | Ref. |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 19 January 2001 | Paperback | 304 | Scholastic Limited | Under Scholastic's (now defunct) Hippo children's book branding | ISBN 9780439998185, 0-439-99818-2 | |
| 1 September 2001 | Audio Cassette | 319 minutes | Chivers Children's Audio Books | Read by Bill Wallis | ISBN 0754052559, 978-0754052555 | |
| 2011 | E-book | 117 | Self-published by Jamie Rix | ISBN 9781908285072, 1908285079 | [12] | |
| 2011, 2014 | eAudiobook | 5h 19m 26s | AudioGO | Audio from Chivers |
| |
| 16 August 2016 | MP3 Audiobook | Brilliance Audio | ISBN 9781531813994, 1531813992 |
References
- Fry, Andy (1 October 1999). "Euro partners render gruesome fables with the right balance". Kidscreen. Retrieved 1 March 2020.
- Bor, Simon. "The Grizzly Corner of My Bookshelf". simons-head.blogspot.com. Archived from the original on 19 December 2019.
- Ghostly Tales for Ghastly Kids (second ed.). Scholastic Books UK. 20 October 1995. p. [COPYRIGHT NOTICE]. ISBN 9780590132428.
Inside illustrations © Bobbie Spargo, 1992
- "Fearsome Tales For Fiendish Kids by Jamie Rix, Ross Collins (Illustrator)". Retrieved 21 November 2019.
- Rix, Jamie (1996). Fearsome Tales for Fiendish Kids: Jamie Rix; Collins, Ross. ISBN 0340667354.
- "Ross Collins' Books — Free Online Best". Retrieved 16 November 2019.
- "More Grizzly Tales for Gruesome Kids, Rix, Jamie, Very Good Book". Retrieved 24 September 2019.
- "Grizzly e-books for Gruesome Kindles". Retrieved 22 November 2019.
- OCLC 45853994
- More Grizzly Tales for Gruesome Kids: Complete & Unabridged. ASIN 0754052559.
- OCLC 49263511
- OCLC 798281095
- "More Grizzly Tales for Gruesome Kids Audiobook - Jamie Rix". Retrieved 29 February 2020.
- OCLC 778721258
- "More Grizzly Tales for Gruesome Kids by Jamie Rix". Retrieved 29 February 2020.
- OCLC 958058715
External links
- E-book edition on the Internet Archive
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