THE GOBLINS GIGGLE AND OTHER STORIES

Bang retells five variously "scary" folktales from as many countries (sources not provided) and illustrates them in black and white with a broadly gruesome band of naked Halloween hobgoblins. The first story — about the old man with a disfiguring wen who finally loses it when goblins take it as insurance that he will return to their dance — is the most awkwardly told, with the old man making superfluous comments such as "Oh! I fell asleep!" and "What a terrible song!" (and then inexplicably wanting to dance and sing himself though there is no indication that the goblins' song has become any less terrible). Other selections, about the dullwitted "Boy Who Wanted to Learn to Shudder" or the Chinese son who retrieves his long lost father from fish-monsters who had kept him to play "Soccer on the Lake," are adequate versions of well known tales, and one, about the old Japanese woman, aided by a nun, who crosses an abacus bridge to rescue her daughter from a goblins' castle, has a climax reminiscent of Mosel's more skillfully developed Funny Little Woman (KR, 1972), but with a twist: when the goblins drink up the river to stop the women's escape by boat, the giggles that send the water back out of their mouths are brought about when the nun, the old woman and the daughter "lean right over and show (their) bare white bottom(s)!" That should be good for a startled hugh, but only the grisly Irish tale of a dead man who eats blood and tries to pull young Mary Cullane into the grave with him will make you shudder.