Best/Bad Book Covers #1

Welcome to the first installment of Best/Bad Book Covers, or B3C as my peeps call it.

West Side!

These posts will feature the Best, the Baddest, and the Best of the Bad in book covers. And after the jump we're kicking it off with a bang!

Drink it all in. It's glorious.

I actually read this book, and based on the cover this shouldn't be a surprise to anyone, but it's not very good. It's not even bad in such an over the top way that it's at least entertaining. No, this book that features whip-wielding Nazi garden gnomes on the cover is flat out boring. That is a sentence I never thought I'd have to write again.

First of all, (and SPOILERS, I guess, if anyone is actually crazy enough to want to read this) the "Little People" of the title don't even show up until about two-thirds of the way through the book. Before that it's just a bunch of people hanging out in an old house, and once in a while something that borders on slightly out of the ordinary happens. Then, when the Little People do finally make an appearance, they are not Nazi garden gnomes as the reader was lead to believe. They're just normal looking people, but shrunk down to 12 inches high or so.

Basically this.

Oh, and they have some sort of lame psychic abilities, but that's it. And they're small because some Nazi scientist conducted experiments to shrink people down for some completely idiotic reason, and then got left behind when he died. I'm sure the Allies are breathing collective sigh of relief his plans never went through.

Also, there's a lot of sexual undertones between the female Little Person and the normal sized adults. Which I have to admit is pretty creepy, but probably not in the way the author intended. Maybe the New York Times quote on the cover is actually a pun.

And while most people wouldn't be surprised that this book is so bad, they would be if they were familiar with the author's more famous work. The John Christopher that wrote this book is the same John Christopher that wrote the Tripod Trilogy. We had to read the books in junior high, and it might be the only books I had to read at school that I really, really liked. And they still hold up. Even though they're young adult books, I re-read them a few years ago and still thought they were great. Check out that amazon link, with 28 reviews it has an average of 5 stars. I was honestly shocked when I found out that the author of this book was also the author of one of my favorite book series from childhood. I guess the one saving grace is that he wrote this book first. 

So at least he got better. Whether the same can be said for me remains to be seen.