Bib and the Scarecrow Made of Mice

'Bib and the Scarecrow Made of Mice' is a collection of short stories, flash fiction and allegorical fragments within the genre of weird fiction, triangulated between horror, fantasy and speculative fiction. While not precisely children's stories, they are often concerned with the infantile world of childhood, while the world of adulthood is extrapolated into ambiguous utopias painted in garish though sympathetic colours. The tone of the collection is pitched somewhere between the childishly spooky and the unpleasantly uncanny, as though R. L. Stine attempted to ghostwrite as Thomas Ligotti. Characteristically, the work is influenced as much by children's telefantasy of the 1990s – 'The Demon Headmaster', 'Round the Twist' and 'Through the Dragon's Eye – as by writers such as Robert Aickman, Robert Coover, Donald Barthelme, Franz Kafka, Hermann Ungar, porpentine charity heartscape and Ursula Le Guin at her strangest. The author's PhD is in the philosophy of Czech animation and his hope is to achieve, on some small level, for literature what Raúl Ruiz and Jan Švankmajer achieved for cinema.