Fungus the Bogeyman

Product Information

It is a hugely entertaining read from start to finish, chronicling the life of Fungus and his grotesque environment.

As an adult, it's funny, but it feels strange for a kid's book, and I imagine that it would go right over the heads of younger readers.On this night, he startles a vicar, a woman in her bath, and stinks out a couple’s bedroom using his Bogey umbilical cord. I had been wanting to read this for years and finally bought it last year but I was so disappointed in it!

For while Fungus' world and his daily life are indeed often minutely, engagingly and even in a strange way beautifully described and depicted (and the accompanying illustrations are gorgeously drawn and actually, amazingly sparkle with their very and often intense general ugliness), really and truly, for and to me, the constant and ever-present referrals to farting, vomiting, grottiness, slime, mould and the like does tend to become rather frustratingly dragging. Deep down underground, in the dark, dripping tunnels of bogeydom, live the bogeys, a vile collection of slimy, smelly creatures who revel in everything revolting. I debated giving it five stars, but there are one or two Briggs books I like even better ( The Snowman and When the Wind Blows, if you were wondering, and even if you weren't), so I held off, no doubt being unforgivably parsimonious with my stars. He would start his journey and that page was full of paragraphs about the history of every place he passed and the function of every item mentioned.

We have more or less straight comics, but also sections of pages treated as if they were notice boards, with text boxes pinned to them, "censored" text, charts, etc. However, Briggs continued to produce humour for children, in works such as the Unlucky Wally series and The Bear. Yes there were bits with Fungus talking to his family and a bit where he is playing tricks on people but a lot of it is just long winded descriptions of things that didn't really interest me.

And while the book was certainly quirky and very funny, it was also very different from what I was expecting it to be. His graphic novel Ethel and Ernest, which portrayed his parents' 41-year marriage, won Best Illustrated Book in the 1999 British Book Awards. It follows one day in the life of the title character, a working class Bogeyman with the mundane job of scaring human beings. Life in Bogeydom is full of snot, smells, slime, scum and other unspeakable things, and Bogeymen live under the ground revelling in allthe nastiness imaginable.This is a delightful, eccentric book, the sort of book that genuinely IS all-ages, a claim often made but rarely merited. When it came out the general public were shocked at the scatological humour, which is now standard in children's literature, but it no longer has that impact. It was a dark departure from Briggs' delightful Father Christmas and the Christmas classic The Snowman and they loved Fungus, his wife and his kids in their subterranean world of snot, pus, boils, filth and decay.

She reassures him and we are shown that bogeyman, disgusting as they are potrayed in this book, still possess the strongest human emotion, love. He spends a good portion of the later part of the book wondering "if this is really worth it" and "why do we do the things we do?Fungus is a great creation / interpretation of a traditional monster, previously enshrined in folklore and now reinvented by Briggs brilliantly for the modern age. Amongst the information given about their lifestyle there is also a more typical storyline where Fungus wakes up, washes (in slime) and cycles to work where he ponders his role in society and the purpose of his existence! English illustrator and children's book author Raymond Briggs is best known in Britain for his 'books without words' told entirely though full color illustrations. A charming first edition of this delightful pop up book, by much loved author of The Snowman, Raymond Briggs. Instead we are left with this dense and contemplative literary work that doesn't talk down to children but rather treats them as intelligent readers and throws in references to the likes of John Milton, Alfred Tennyson, William Oldys, Thomas Carlyle and John Donne.