BEWARE THE MONSTER

A hairy, horned turquoise-and-ocher monster’s insatiable appetite drives the action in this metafictive picture book that combines humor, fear, and a touch of gross-out humor.

Readers are warned that “This book contains a monster with a GREAT BIG APPETITE!!” At first he “does look pretty small. But that’s because he’s far away,” napping peacefully in a busy landscape filled with apple trees, birds, and cows. But then he wakes up (it’s your fault), ties a napkin around his neck, and starts to feast. First he eats all the apples on the trees. Then he eats the leaves, the trees themselves, and everything else on the page. (Bye-bye, cows.) In a moment of fourth-wall–breaking terror he turns his attention toward readers and advances ominously. Well-timed suspense builds to the breaking point, when, at the last moment before readers’ doom, the monster upchucks spectacularly, hurling flora and fauna out in a bizarre jumble of bees that hoot and apple-bedecked cows, who apparently suffer no loss of life. The monster, whose eyes are bigger than his stomach (ha, get it), will “take care of you later,” whenever a child begs to be read this book again.

This funny and energetic story is a worthy addition to the pantheon of meta monster books, offering its own unique fillips of delight.