Fungus the Bogeyman

Product Information

We learn about Bogey houses, their family structure, what they do for fun, how they live, the essentials of their health and well-being, and more. It is not for everyone's taste, I mean you have to be keen on slime, pus and muck but hey, that is what makes a bogeyman happy. By using the Web site, you confirm that you have read, understood, and agreed to be bound by the Terms and Conditions. There's a really nice balance of gunk and slime that will appeal to the 5 year old target audience that this title is listed under in the 1001 book, whilst the mundane weariness of work will resonate with the parents.

I had been wanting to read this for years and finally bought it last year but I was so disappointed in it!

For a picture book (and even for a short comic book style graphic novel obviously and primarily meant for children), Raymond Briggs' Fungus the Bogeyman is actually in many ways rather sophisticated and involved humour and narrative-wise.

The story follows one day in the life of this fabulous character, a working class Bogeyman with the mundane job of scaring human beings. The book is also wonderfully illustrated, it helps convey to the reader the life of the bogeyman, his habits, family life, house, garden and social life. It does so in a manner that is always fast paced and the reader is never easy as the turning of each page brings another revolting revelation. Making things go bump in the night can be satisfying in its way, and a pint of slime goes down nicely after work. And even considering that many children do seem to massively relish and cherish humour based on bodily functions and liquid excretions, I do have to wonder whether the massive amounts of the latter occurring in Fungus the Bogeyman might well end up being potentially distracting and even too much of a "good thing" (so much so as to even jade and feel dragging for children who usually enjoy this type of humour, these types of jokes).It reads almost like a comic book with incredibly detailed illustrations in individual boxes with speech bubbles or text.

Questioning the meaning of life becomes more insightful and urgent, in a way, when the life in question is the antithesis of all we supposedly hold dear in our human world; the removal allows for a more dispassionate consideration of the existential void at the core of the universe than a realistic treatment would allow, but the humour mitigates the likelihood of despair. Raymond Briggs at his very best – Fungus the Bogeyman is a delightfully, lovely story in all its disgustingly noxious glory. The topic was inspired after Briggs watched a Panorama documentary on nuclear contingency planning, and the dense format of the page was inspired by a Swiss publisher's miniature version of Father Christmas. Combine that rudimentary appeal with a very adult level of punning and an endearing melancholy and you have Fungus. Fungus lives an ordinary life, he gets up, gets prepared for work, makes the commute, does his job and wonders what is it all about?As a children’s book today, I would not recommend it: there are many references to British culture in the 70s that simply would not be understood; the vocabulary used is quite advanced (at times fantastical) and thus I would not even be sure at what age group this book should be aimed; and as the book is so dated, it feels sexist and racist by today’s standards. When it came out the general public were shocked at the scatological humour, which is now standard in children's literature, but it no longer has that impact.

When I started reading books by this author, I was expecting something more fanciful like The Snowman, but found titles much closer in tone and themes to The Man. Bogeymen like: silence, tasting books, losing or drawing games, wetness, rotten smells and slowness. She reassures him and we are shown that bogeyman, disgusting as they are potrayed in this book, still possess the strongest human emotion, love. Life in Bogeydom is full of snot, smells, slime, scum and other unspeakable things, and Bogeymen live under the ground revelling in all the nastiness imaginable. An immensely inventive picture book landmark enjoyed as much by adults as children, Briggs' incredibly detailed classic charts a day in the gleefully gross and disgusting life of the eponymous monster.English illustrator and children's book author Raymond Briggs is best known in Britain for his 'books without words' told entirely though full color illustrations.