The Monster Maintenance Manual

 Note added October 2025: I have just undertaken a major revision of this work with new monsters and more blood, guts and madness. 

This book, with Adele K. Thomas' delightful illustrations (left), designed to match my whimsical descriptions, was badly managed by a house that was in crisis. Murdoch Books (no relation to Rupert!) was later taken over by Allen and Unwin, but all print copies were remaindered or pulped. I still have a small stock of the originals, but this was written for children like my children and grandchildren, and I wanted it out there.

I have not lost sight, either, of the way the meltdown also lost us the interest that Cartoon Connection had in the book. I planned to write a series of Mr Men-style stories about my monsters, and I had drafted a dozen of those, which remain my IP, so I have decided to add them in the new edition, along with some discarded monsters and a few new monsters.

This is not a book for the faint-hearted, not if you drill down into the word-plays, puns and sneaky references. This is me having fun, knowing that the right sorts of adult reading this will grok it, but perhaps not share it, because the right sort of kid, in years to come, will suddenly realise why one of the piano tunas was called Bosendorfer. I was that right sort of kid, and I still am. Live with it!

The heirs to the publishers failed to claim the rights to Adele's images, but I decided to use my own, anyhow, shots like this sequence of Schrödinger's Cheshire Elephant:

The stipple style that I use is something I learned from being a biologist, and the monsters emerged from my becoming a bureaucrat who sat through interminable meetings. I found that if I sat between two droning bores and doodled, they became distracted by the weird creatures that emerged from my dotting pen. They would fall silent, leaving the rest of us to get on with formulating policies. You see, I was that rare sort of bureaucrat who could walk and talk at the same time...

So, long before I found a literary use for things like this beastie on the right (for the purposes of the book, it is now a piano tuna), they served a useful purpose.

Here are some samples: The last of the Copywrong Pirates;
The Deconstructionist who liked books; and
The Mud Alligators who liked kitchens

Buying it:

An ebook in slight colour for Kindle, $6, and

A print-on-demand paperback in black and white because that's all you need, $25.

The base page for all of these books is here.