From My Reading Chair…
This is not a book. This is an invitation…
To be curiously immersed in exceptional storytelling; consumed by horror, humour and hope.
The Worst Thing That Could Possibly Happen by Guy Bass and David Roberts feels like stepping into a liminal space of its own; a portal of surrealism, an eerie, unsettling excellence into the sideways world behind the world.
It feels extremely reductive to compare such an original, unique and bizarrely timeless book to anything else, but there are light echoes of The Twilight Zone x Edward Gorey here; two delicious influences that never overwhelm its own fresh identity.
I genuinely felt like I was able to time travel back through their lives, through nostalgia and into the side doors of the souls of two little humans who unashamedly loved the weird wholeheartedly, and who emerged into adulthood cloaked in peculiarity and resistance. There’s an imprint of all the things they lived and loved through echoing in this collaboration, and that is quite the lens through which to view the stories.
Bass gives us an incredibly varied collection of stories, moving through the macabre, surreal and properly frightening mindscapes. Just when you think you’ve worked out the rules, something shifts and you’re somewhere completely uncharted again (No literally, your view becomes twisted because you need to adapt to the changes of the page designs!).
There’s a relentless battery of fresh ideas and mind-bending concepts, stretching your emotions and sense of humour to their limits. Positively so.
Underneath the horror there’s something surprisingly vulnerable too, a familiar ache ruminating through the pages like running your tongue over the tender hollow where your gum has recently divorced a tooth or a crusty scab you pick at the edges of.
You know shouldn’t, but you do it anyway.
There’s something about fear that makes us want to poke, prod and pick away at it the same too. Stories give us somewhere to explore those jagged edges within us all: to recoil, creep back, laugh at something horrible, then find that the thing we laughed at has become frightening while we weren’t looking, before repeating it all over again!
That delicate balance between fear and delight is where these stories really got under my skin and solidified my love for them.
And then to pair this bombardment of thrills with David Roberts’ illustrations?! Perfection!
Roberts’ gorgeously dark, eerie, malignant linework, deliberate use of limited colours and playfulness with space give the whole book an otherworldly visual rhythm.
The illustrations react to and converse with Bass’s stories rather than simply repeating or narrating them. Roberts’ illustrations sometimes seem to know something the words haven’t told you yet, like an escape door just out of reach.
There’s this brilliant visual juxtaposition of the mundane and the malevolent, until the two begin to merge and you’re no longer quite sure where one ends and the other begins.
I became slightly obsessed with the recurring motifs appearing throughout; a visual language in and of itself!
The whole thing becomes a tangled, mangled weave of horror, wicked humour and gorgeously ghastly frights in the best possible way. They have created a book that demands more attention, more re-reads, more play, more interaction and I adore it beyond my own comprehension.
Buy it for your loved ones, your libraries, your schools or yourself, then open the sideways door and have a little look…after all, what’s the worst thing that could possibly happen?!
