"The Chronicles of Harris Burdick"

The Chronicles of Harris Burdick: Fourteen Amazing Authors Tell The Tales (Various authors)

One of the neater Chris Van Allsburg books is "The Mysteries of Harris Burdick", a collection of 14 images with cryptic captions (my favorite being the last one, a house blasting off with the title "It was a perfect lift off"). The idea is that you use the little cyptic caption and the picture and write a short story, or just let your imagination go wild. In this collection, fourteen authors are rounded up to write their own take on an image.
This book lives or dies on the writing quality (well, I guess every book does, but even more so). Some of the shorts - "A Strange Day in July" and "Uninvited Guests" - are great. Some of them, like "Missing in Venice" and "Under the Rug" are enjoyable larfs. Unfortunatly, there's a lot of stinkers. "Another Time, Another Place" and "The Seven Chairs" are both really bad, not just badly written, but squandering some great concepts. ("The Seven Chairs" is the worst offender here; The image is a nun flying 100 feet up in a chair and the title "The fifth chair ended up in France," and the story is, there's this woman who can fly in chairs, and the fifth chair she can fly in goes to France, and she becomes a nun. Oh, you wanted to know if the story had a point? No; At least, not one besides the author getting paid.)
All in all, this is an interesting book, but there are more bad stories than good - I want to say it's about a 2:1 ratio - and the one-two punch of the book ending with Chris van Allsberg's own completely boring and pointless contribution and Stephen King's awful story about an abusive history professor dad (who drives a Porsche?) based on my favorite picture of the house lifting off kind of left a bad taste in my mouth.  I found it enjoyable when I viewed each take not as the final word on these images, but just as each author's take. That being said, I feel like you'll have more fun with the original book making up your own stories.

Grade: C-