WEEK 13

FUNGUS THE BOGEYMAN

BY RAYMOND BRIGGS

Fungus the Bogeyman is a 1977 book by children’s illustrator Raymond Briggs.

It tells the story of a day in the life of Fungus, the titular bogeyman, from when he wakes up in the night time until he goes to bed in the morning. Fungus’ day job is scaring people, a task which he goes about with a workaday lack of ardour as he questions whether or not he is suited to his job.

Briggs packs every page of this wonderful book with tons of detail as he beautifully describes and draws every bit of Fungus’ day, and builds a sludgetastic sub-world of muck and grime that exists unseen alongside our own. Fungus, his family and fellow bogeymen live on a diet of gone-off milk and rotting food and live in dampness and gunge – they love and live exactly the opposite of everyday humans (whom the bogeymen refer to as ‘drycleaners’) – but despite the grunge they still exist within a loving family environment.

The pages are formatted in a comic book style, with speech bubbles, captions and panels that tickled my inner geek even when I first read it at the age of ten. The grossness factor throughout the book is off the scale, you can almost smell the crud off the pages. (A scratch’n’sniff Fungus the Bogyman book, now there’s an idea…)

This book really appeals to kids between 7 and 11 years old, especially those who enjoy a good fart joke, a fact which is backed up by its sales to date of over 80,000 copies. It has spawned theatre and TV adaptations, and is available in a ‘plop-up’ edition. It also helped spawn films like Monsters Inc. and Shrek.

Raymond Briggs is the author and illustrator of the wildly popular Christmas book The Snowman and also Where The Wind Blows, about the horrific after effects of nuclear war, but Fungus, with its extravagant playful horridness, remains my favourite.