Sendak's Freaky Tale of Goblin Abductions is Really Out There

In Jim Henson's Labyrinth, spirited young heroine Sarah has a copy of Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are in her room. I can't help but wonder whether Henson ever read Outside Over There, another story by Sendak involving young children and strange creatures. In this Caldecott Honor book, Ida, a girl who is a few years younger than Sarah, similarly loses her baby sibling to goblin abduction and must retrieve her. Curiously, Sendak's goblins look just like babies; I'm not sure if this is how they always look or if it's just a momentary disguise to confuse Ida. In any case, the basic plot is similar, though the two stories unfold very differently.

Outside Over There isn't a very long book, and there's only a sentence or two of text per page. Our focus is supposed to be on the paintings that take up most of the space. These are artful and pretty realistic, though there is a strangeness to them I can't quite pin down. Sendak's done some pretty trippy stuff before - In the Night Kitchen is especially bizarre - so it's no great surprise to find another of his books to be exceptionally odd.

The illustration in which the yowling baby is carried away by goblins while Ida idly plays her horn beside a freakish-looking faux infant made of ice is chilling, as is the one in which Ida floats over the city, yellow cloak flapping wildly, as the goblins, concealed in their wraith-like robes, stand guard over her sister. Ida always has a melancholy look about her, which is appropriate for a girl whose father is away at sea and whose sister has been taken, but it makes her a little harder to embrace. The colors used throughout the book are deep and dark, the landscape and clothing richly textured. I can understand why the artwork was recognized; I just don't care for it all that much.

I'm also not crazy about the writing style, which is clipped and seems to be trying to achieve a particular dialect, though I can't say what that would be. Words that seem like they should be adverbs become adjectives, as in "they quick churned," or adjectives that should be integrated more naturally into the sentence show up after the noun, as in "Ida mad" and "Ida sly".

Outside Over There is an odd and unsettling little book, and it's not nearly as creative and action-packed as Labyrinth, so I'd recommend the latter if you're in the mood for goblins and stick with the wild things if you've got a hankering for Sendak.