Word: allsburgs
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This is the unsettling world of Chris Van Allsburg. The children's illustrator and author creates books that abound in dramatic perspectives, teasing narratives and haunting, incongruous images. Other authors may try to improve children with edifying themes or thrill them with shocks; Van Allsburg, a small, shy man of 40, simply taps into their vast reservoir of mystery. "To puzzle children is more interesting to me than to educate or frighten them," he says. "I like to plant a seed that will start a mental process, rather than present...
...group sets out in search of edible treasure. When the sugar is found, each takes one grain and heads back -- except for Two Bad Ants (Houghton Mifflin; $15.95). Their mishaps with a spoon, a toaster, a cup of coffee and a human mouth are the subjects of Chris Van Allsburg's tale, brilliantly illuminated with renderings of a world seen from the underside, as two tiny protagonists scamper through its wonders and terrors on all sixes...
...Caslon Players are not actors; they are letters. The name of the troupe refers to their typography. As for the play, it consists of cavorting onstage in this year's most original alphabet book, The Z Was Zapped (Houghton Mifflin; $15.95). Chris Van Allsburg's narrative grants each performer an alliterative role: the D was nearly Drowned, the I was nicely Iced, the Y was Yanked away. His mastery of pencil and graphite dust humanizes the characters and lends them an air of drama, as if they were about to receive major parts in the theater of words, paragraphs...
Chris Van Allsburg is a magic realist whose haunting illustrations are full of silence and mystery -- perhaps too much mystery for his slender narratives. In The Stranger (Houghton Mifflin; $15.95), 15 autumnal watercolors all but supplant the story of a nameless figure knocked down by a farmer's pickup. He recuperates at the farm, mute but helpful. As long as the mysterious man is present, the farmer's fields stay green, while all around them leaves turn the color of fire. Winter comes only when the stranger departs. Every year thereafter, the frosty windows bear a Delphic message...
Late one Dec. 24, a boy finds a train stopped outside his house. A conductor beckons him aboard. It is the first of many astonishments in The Polar Express + by Chris Van Allsburg (Houghton Mifflin; $15.95). Other surprises include club cars full of similarly dazed children in pajamas and nightgowns, woods full of wolves and, finally, the frozen sea of the polar ice cap--Santa Claus country. Van Allsburg has given the commonplace a legendary air, and the boy's return seems every bit as gilded as the elves, Santa's airborne sled and the homeward-bound express train, with...