Saturday, October 20, 2018

This Week's Oz Short Story

We're back to one-and-done short stories from The Lost Tales of Oz again, and this week it's "Chop" by Eric Shanower. This is definitely an appropriate story for the Halloween season! In his wanderings around Oz, Button Bright comes to Mount Munch and a wall of air surrounding a house at its base. The occupant, the character known as Chopfyt in The Tin Woodman of Oz, lets him in and tells a little bit about his story in recent years. It seems his patchwork nature, as a man made up of the parts of two other men, has made him fascinated with the way things are put together, and he has started taking things apart to discover just that. Then he starts experimenting on the local animals! I don't want to say any more, as it would give away too much of the story, but this was definitely creepy and disturbing, in large part because it was also so logical and seems appropriate for all the characters involved.

2 comments:

nokocchi said...

Hi! I was wondering if there was any way I could get my hands on a copy of this short story? I’m very interested in reading it but it’s at none of the libraries by me and I can’t find it online.

Eric said...

Well, if you can afford to buy it, the title of the book is also a link to buying it. (It is the hardback, but click on the author name and you can find the paperback.) If you just want to borrow it, ask your library about interlibrary loan. That's where they borrow it from another library that has it, then loan it to you. I don't know how available this would be in other library systems, but you never know.