So begins “Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children” by Ransom Riggs (Quirk Books, Philadelphia, 2011, 352 pages), a superlatively spooky tale that is in several ways a darker, more serious take on Cartoon Network’s magnificently self-aware “Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends.”
As he was growing up, Jacob “Jake” Portman listened intently as his grandfather told him of an unusual childhood during the Second World War, when Abe wound up in a strange foster home full of even stranger children.
Jake eventually stops believing the tall tales—but then he is witness to his grandfather’s gruesome murder at the hands of some kind of monster. Except no one believes him, and now the 16-year-old Jake has to go to therapy and remembers Abe’s last words to him: “Go to the island. You’ll be safe there. Promise me…”
The discovery of an old letter and a bunch of odd-looking photographs capturing the image of odder-looking children catches Jake’s attention, and he decides to track down this foster home that his grandfather told so many stories about and maybe find out if Jake is going crazy or not.
This journey brings him to far-off Wales—and somehow to Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, where he meets Alma Le Fay Peregrine and her gifted charges—in the Second World War. Wait, what?
Untangling history
Don’t worry, Riggs patiently explains how that came to be. Jake untangles his grandfather’s true history, as well as enjoys the company of the Peculiars.
Hot on the heels of Jake’s arrival at the Home, there is something sinister and somehow unseen trying to find the Home, and it brings death with it. And what does it have to do with Jake?
Riggs, a filmmaker and blogger, writes a superbly scary tale, displaying a penchant for the unexpectedly droll as well as the somewhat grotesque, just enough to creep out a reader without scaring them off.
He makes for a very convincing 16-year-old. Miss Peregrine is a fascinating creation, but the book’s real treasure are the Peculiars themselves, each one a startlingly original creation, with Riggs showing he can be equally playful and morbid.
But the story is aided by the presence of the oddball photographs Riggs mentions in the text—and these are actual vintage photographs found in flea markets, or so Riggs claims. This innovation is something that makes sense, as publisher Quirk also releases the now infamous “Pride, Prejudice and Zombies.”
“Peculiar’s” particular usage of the images is akin to the interactive magic of Brian Selznick’s “The Invention of Hugo Cabret.” Together with the letters, Quirk puts it all together in an elaborately effective format.
There’s something to scare you and something to keep you interested in this, what Riggs clearly intends to be the first of a series of books about the Peculiars. Ransom Rigg’s debut novel “Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children” is a spooky sendoff for what promises to be a uniquely Peculiar group of children we’d like to visit again and again.