An Elsewhere TM where the viewer could tour alien landscapes, meet interesting characters, and maybe even get in an adventure. Perhaps it's that the frame of a painting sometimes looks less like the boarder of a picture and more like the edge of a window to another world. What is it about paintings that so captures the imagination of writers? Certainly enchanted paintings have played a central role in the works of Rowling, King, Wilde, Dahl, and many, many others. And that ought to be worth an email from author Jacqueline West asking why I used Hitler to segue to her book for children:) In The Books of Elsewhere, if you stare into a painting, the painting stares into you. But it inspired Hitler, who was a painter.

Either way, I'm still not entirely sure what it means. Įsteemed Reader, Friedrich Nietzch once wrote, 'if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes into you.' Or maybe it was his sister. Jacqueline West will be here Thursday to face the 7 Questions. After a few days of listening to that, the neighbors had had enough. McMartin’s three cats, somewhere inside the house, began the most terrible yowling ever heard on quiet old Linden Street. The gigantic jungle fern that hung from the porch ceiling keeled over for lack of water. The rusty mailbox began to bulge with odd and exotic mail-order catalogs, which eventually overflowed the gaping aluminum door and spilled out into the street. However, there were several notable clues that things in the McMartin house were not as they should have been. It had taken some time for the neighbors to grow suspicious, since no one ever went in or came out of the old stone house on Linden Street anyway.

The books of elsewhere