Dannii Elle's Reviews > The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy & Other Stories

"They took a baseball bat
and whacked open his head.
Mummy Boy fell to the ground;
he finally was dead.
Inside of his head
were no candy or prizes,
just a few stray beetles
of various sizes."

The poems collected here were all a combination of bizarre and distressing, bewitching and hilarious, in the way that only Tim Burton can do. Each was formed of a few, simple lines and accompanied with small illustrations that matched the overall horrifying yet adorable tone of the collection.

This, by no means, contained any poetic masterpieces. In fact, some did not work at all, with the odd clunky rhyme or lengthy line that ruined the poem's flow. This stopped me from giving this collection the full five stars that most of the poems deserved. They do not deserve them for their genius but for their morbidity and weirdness. The black humour made me giggle and the Gothic contents appealed to me greatly. In short, this collection delivered everything I wanted it to.