A book that eats people could only come from a town full of foodies, like Ann Arbor.
Excerpt:
You might want to be careful handling local author John Perry’s first children’s book. And if you’re not sure why, you probably need look no further than the glowering eyes on its bright red cover, peeking up over yellow cautionary tape that proclaims “The Book That Eats People” (Tricycle Press).
“As a dad, I can’t imagine walking into a bookstore and seeing that title and not picking it up just to see what it was,” said Perry, a resident of Ann Arbor for the last 15 years, who admits that his 4- and 7-year-old daughters had pretty much exhausted his appreciation of “fairy stories, stories with morals and stories that went to the beach.”
This book has none of that; the closest it comes to moralizing is when the marauding literary monster, during a stint of hard time for snacking on three neighborhood kids, also polishes off a cellmate “who deserved it.” It spends much of his time in predictable places — school, library, nightstand — with rather tragic results in each (the library’s really going to miss that night security guard) before the well-intentioned folks at the zoo decide it’s an incorrigible beast and… well, I won’t tell you what happens next. But make sure you wash any trace of peanut butter or cookies from your hands before you pick it up.
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