Bones and Berserkers

I mentioned in my recent review of Chloe Bristol’s picture book of The Raven that the Poe fan is chronically short of material making Poe accessible to kids. Her book was a welcome exception. Here’s another.

One of our family’s great favorites right now is Nathan Hale’s Hazardous Tales, a series of historical graphic novels aimed at eight- to twelve-year olds. Nathan Hale is both the author and artist behind the series and—in the form of tragically terrible spy Nathan Hale—the narrator of most of the books. Each book begins with Hale on the gallows with two other characters, the Hangman and the Provost, the British officer in charge of his execution. Hale, in order to buy time before his date with the noose, entertains the others with stories from history past and future.

It’s a fun concept and Hale—both of them—executes it brilliantly. All the stories I’ve looked at so far have been well-researched and beautifully designed and illustrated, and the Hale, Hangman, and Provost characters work as a kid-friendly chorus, popping into the scenes to comment on the action, ask questions, and provide comic relief from the frequently grim subject matter. Hale (the author) presents the stories faithfully, with charity and nuance but without blunting the truth. Since discovering them at our local library I’ve encouraged the kids to read them, and they’ve happily gobbled them up.

Favorite so far include Raid of No Return (Pearl Harbor and the Doolittle Raid), Alamo All-Stars (the Texas Revolution), Treaties, Trenches, Mud, and Blood (World War I), Above the Trenches (World War I aviation), Lafayette! (the Marquis de Lafayette in the American Revolution) and Donner Dinner Party (self-explanatory). The kids not only enjoy them, they’ve learned a lot. Touring Patriots Point in Charleston over the weekend, my daughter recognized a life-size cutout of Jimmy Doolittle in the USS Yorktown’s hangar and demanded I take her picture with him. A proud dad moment.

Bones and Berserkers is the thirteenth in the series, and to mark the occasion Hale offers an anthology of thirteen short stories. A storm rolls in on Hale, Hangman, Provost, and Bill Richmond (a fourth narrator who becomes more prominent as the series goes on), who shelter under the gallows and build a fire to stay warm. This frame tale sets up an exchange of campfire stories—horror tales.

The stories range wonderfully. We get folklore like the Jersey Devil, the “demon cat” haunting the US Capitol, and the Gullah Geechee story of the boo hag, a woman who sloughs off her skin at night to drink blood from the living. The book includes true stories like Abraham Lincoln’s dream of his own funeral in the White House; Eben Byers, a golfer whose excessive use of radium-infused patent medicine disintegrated his jaw and left his corpse radioactive a century on; and the axe murder at Frank Lloyd Wright’s house Taliesin, which left Wright’s mistress, both of her children, and four employees dead and the house burned to the ground. Then there are uncertain blends of fact and fiction, like the well full of Confederate dead at South Mountain and the career of California bandito Joaquín Murrieta, both of which are true stories so heavily embellished that it remains impossible to say which details are accurate.

But the stories that first drew my attention are purely literary. The only story narrated by the Provost—who wants to prove he can tell a scary story—is an adaptation of the underappreciated Edgar Allan Poe tale “Hop-Frog.” Every word of the story in comic form comes verbatim from Poe, a wonderful touch, and the cruelty of the king’s court and Hop-Frog’s deliciously grotesque revenge are vividly realized. The other is a portion of The Saga of King Hrolf Kraki, an Icelandic legendary saga about a king reclaiming his stolen inheritance with a band of warriors, his chance encounters with Odin, and his eventual doom at the hands of his sorceress half-sister. Marvelous stuff, and a great kids’ introduction to both lesser-known Poe and the sagas.

All of the stories are excellent. The drawings are beautifully done, and Hale experiments a bit from story to story. Most of them have the series’ clean, energetic signature look, but Lincoln’s dream, a simple two-page spread in a charcoal sketch-like style, and “The Butler Who Went Berserk,” about the tragedy at Wright’s Taliesin, drawn in a series of geometric panels mimicking Wright’s style, are standouts. The characters in “Hop-Frog” also look a bit like 1930s Warner Brothers cartoons, with exaggerated round features and shiny eyelids. A nice choice for the heightened tone of the story.

And the care put into research is evident throughout, both in the art and the storytelling. Historical costumes look good in every story, especially the semi-legendary story of Hrolf Kraki, which has evocative Viking Age design (with at least one nod to pre-Viking Norse art). Hale also makes sure the context and details necessary to the story are clear, whether through the chorus of characters chiming in to ask, in-story conversation, or dedicated explainers, like a succinct one-page explanation of the berserkr of Norse legend. At the end of the book, Hale includes a page detailing which stories are true, which are fiction, and which lie in some uncertain place in-between.

It’s nice both to enjoy a book and appreciate the effort put into getting things right, but the stories and the dread and terror they offer are the main attraction. Hale promises spooks and horror and delivers. In the same way he doesn’t downplay or ignore difficult or uncomfortable details in his historical books, he doesn’t skimp on the atmosphere, the scares, or the gruesome details. It’s never gratuitous or excessive and Hale’s narrators offer expertly timed comic relief—including dashes of juvenile humor that I certainly enjoyed—but this book isn’t for the faint of heart, either. Really sensitive kids should probably skip it—something Hale’s characters themselves warn the reader about on the title page.

But if you think your kids can handle a good fright and want to expose them to a thrilling blend of legend, literature, and real spooky history, Bones and Berserkers is a fun and exciting read. I’d gladly recommend it alongside the other favorites in the series mentioned above.