Recently, I was wasting time in a local mall, waiting for the jewelry show to repair the crystal in my watch, and I wandered into one of those massive cafe/book stores to waste some time.  After meandering around the cookbook section (which is always my first destination), I came across a display containing this book.  Now, I don’t normally purchase fiction books.  I usually check them out of the library because, with only a few exceptions, once I’ve read a book, I rarely feel a need to re-read it.  But after reading the first five pages, I carried the book to the register and purchased it.

Heck: Where the Bad Kids Go is a story of two children, Milton and Marlo Fauster, who die in a freak exploding marshmallow disaster and are sent to Heck–a Purgatory Lite for children to await the judgement that will assign them their fate in the afterlife.  Heck is, in essence an eternal boarding school headed by the mellifluous demoness, Bea "Elsa" Bubb.  Like Harry Potter gone wrong, Heck is populated with all sorts of both students and teachers, including Home Ec teacher, Lizzy Borden, Ethics instructor Richard Nixon, and the resident torturer/gym teacher, Black Beard.  The demon guards use pitchsporks to wrangle the children, and there’s even a Kinderscare to help care for children suffering through the painful withdrawal of their addiction to phonics.

The story follows Milton and Marlo, and their friend Virgil, as they try to make multiple attempts to escape from their wrongful imprisonment in Heck.

Written by Dale E. Basye, a Portland, Oregon based film critic and columnist, Heck is full of delicious, yet groan-inducing, puns, hilarious asides, and really twisted humor.  Basye writes in a snappy, almost essay-like style.  The tone of the writing is aimed more toward the child/teen set, but the actual content would be lost on most kids.  An understanding of classic literature, theology, and history are required to get all the asides and inside jokes–and there are a TON of jokes.

There were multiple passages that had me laughing out loud, which rarely happens when I’m reading.  Take this passage:

"To live in Limbo is to live in a pit full of not-so-quick-sand, waiting.  Just…waiting.  It’s suffering without the torment.

What’s the point of Limbo, you may ask impatiently, hoping to jump to a hasty conclusion?  Well, just hold your skittish ponies, now.  Limbo isn’t just nothing.  It’s the excruciating awareness of nothing.

Think of Limbo as a big, slow spiritual laundry that is trying to cleanse you of impatience.  Time doesn’t pass, but that doesn’t mean nothing happens:  it just never happens fast enough.  And in the waiting is the lesson.

You know when you’re in the dentist’s office, flipping through those horrible, ancient magazines like Livestock Today, Macrame World, Slug Fancy, and Modern Tax Advisor, listening to music so boring that it’s barely music?  And it’s not only dull, but the whole time that you’re there doing nothing you hear the whine of the dentist’s drill, the sound of someone trying to talk but they can’t because they have a rubber glove in their mouth, and the thousand-year-old receptionists blathering on to her aunt Edna on the phone about the meat loaf she ate last night and how moist it was–ugh, the worst word in the English language, moist–and, to top it off, there’s some toddler with sniffles in the corner banging the back of his chair against the wall.

This is Limbo.  It’s frustrating, irritating, and nothing happens fast enough because nothing is happening.  It’s like racing toward a horizon that you can never reach.  It’s like trying to catch a rainbow.  It’s like trying to empty the ocean with a spatula."

All is not perfect with the book.  The pacing is a little off, and I wished that, instead of being almost a novella, that this book had been fleshed out a little more: I wanted to feel more like I was in Heck with Milton, Marlo, and Virgil, experiencing it– rather than watching the story as an objective outsider.  The characters could have used slightly more development, instead of being used as a canvas on which to paint the humor.

But the humor.  This book was laugh-out-loud funny from beginning to end.  And, if the end placard is any indication, it’s going to be a cycle of books, one for each of the rings of Heck–a la Dante.  I, for one, will be in line to buy the next one as soon as it’s available.

I am, at heart, a child. A bitter, sarcastic child, yes, but a child nonetheless. I love animation. I like playing in the dirt. I adore the Muppets. I have absorbed Muppet trivia and information like a sponge. You tell me the Muppet (even a vague description) and I can spout back the puppet’s name, puppeteer, and filmography. It was precisely for this reason that I finally picked up the autobiography of Muppeteer Kevin Clash, the voice of Elmo.

Born and raised outside of Baltimore, Clash grew up building puppets out of his mother’s slippers and the lining of his father’s Sunday coats. By the age of 12, he was making money as a puppeteer, and by the time he was a teenager, he and his puppets were regulars on a local television show. By the time he was 19, he had established a career as a puppeteer with the Captain Kangaroo show and another one of my perennial favorites, The Great Space Coaster. Shortly thereafter, Clash found himself in the dream job of his youth as a Muppeteer with the great Jim Henson companies.

The birth of Elmo was one of those happy flukes. Fellow muppeteer Richard Hunt, who passed away in 1994, flung a random puppet, then known as ‘Baby Monster’ to Clash and said, “Give it a voice, Clash.” Since then, Elmo, as he was eventually renamed, has become a world-wide phenomenon.

In My Life as a Furry Red Monster, Clash and his co-author take a rather unusual approach to the re-telling of Clash’s life story and the story behind perhaps the most popular puppet in television history. Instead of a chronological retelling of his life history, Clash opts instead to divide the chapters into life lessons such as tolerance, friends, and joy. Using stories from his early childhood, his life as Elmo, and from Elmo’s point of view, Clash illustrates the importance of these aspects of life.

In some ways, this unique approach works. One can see, particularly in Clash’s retelling of events that have happened to him as the voice of Elmo, how one small three and a half year old with a hyper-active imagination and an unlimited capacity to love has changed the world and improved it for so many.

This is not, however, a history lesson in Elmo and the Muppets. The facts and behind-the-scenes tidbits that are so tantalizing and fascinating to a reader such as myself are in very short supply, and entirely out of order. We read about the death of Muppet creator Jim Henson within the first paragraph. We never really learn anything in-depth about Clash’s induction into the Muppet hall-of-fame or how he progressed from muppeteer-in-training to director, producer, and muppeteer-in-training trainer.

The writing is very accessible and engaging; the voice, personal. However, it is difficult to follow the though path of Clash and his co-writer due to some very unusual stream-of-consciousness thought paths that have Clash in one paragraph recounting his childhood, the next paragraph preaching about a topic, and then immediately back to the Sesame Street studios. It’s a short work, coming in at just over 200 half-sized pages, and when all is said and done, I felt rather unfulfilled by my experience.

I also had a small complaint about the form factor of the book. Instead of being a standard size, the book was printed in an unusual 6.7” x 5.9” form factor, which makes holding the book open with one hand a difficult process. I found my hand cramping after just a few minutes holding the book open.

Clash does do one job well, however, and that’s relating Elmo’s experiences to those faced by adults and the world in general. Clash relates particularly touching experiences, including the introduction of Elmo to a group of small school children in the newly apartheid-free South Africa in preparation for the release of a South African version of Sesame Street and his experiences in New Orleans following the devastation of Hurricane Katrina. It’s easy to see how, in Elmo’s life, the ability to distribute love freely has resulted in love being returned to him ten-fold—and the difference that has made in the lives of countless children and adults.

Toward the end of the book, Clash writes

“We go to school to learn—from out instructors, from our books, from each other. And at some point, we begin to listen to another teacher: our dreams. We think about what could be, what might happen once we’re all grown up, what we might be able to do without our budding talents or our latest interests. Dreams are fragile things, but when they’ve been bolstered by the support of parents and teachers, and reinforced with early success, they can withstand the skeptics and take flight.”

This, perhaps more than any other statement, defines what this book is about. Though light on the “literature,” history, and behind-the-scenes tidbits, My Life As A Furry Red Monster is all about the quest of a furry, red, three-and-a-half year old monster to make the world a better place, one hug and one laugh at a time.

Rating: B