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Gonna Roll the Bones
Joe Slattermill is about to experience a night he'll never forget. Tired of his decrepit house, he leaves his wife and mother behind and sets out for a night at The Boneyard. Joe has a knack for dice throwing and figures he can take on any opponent. But can he win when the stakes are raised, and it's his life he's gambling for? A classic fable in the tradition of The Devil and Daniel Webster.
32 pages, Hardcover
First published October 1, 1967
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180 people want to read
About the author
Fritz Leiber
1,338 books1,053 followersFritz Reuter Leiber Jr. was one of the more interesting of the young writers who came into HP Lovecraft's orbit, and some of his best early short fiction is horror rather than sf or fantasy. He found his mature voice early in the first of the sword-and-sorcery adventures featuring the large sensitive barbarian Fafhrd and the small street-smart-ish Gray Mouser; he returned to this series at various points in his career, using it sometimes for farce and sometimes for gloomy mood pieces--The Swords of Lankhmar is perhaps the best single volume of their adventures. Leiber's science fiction includes the planet-smashing The Wanderer in which a large cast mostly survive flood, fire, and the sexual attentions of feline aliens, and the satirical A Spectre is Haunting Texas in which a gangling, exo-skeleton-clad actor from the Moon leads a revolution and finds his true love. Leiber's late short fiction, and the fine horror novel Our Lady of Darkness, combine autobiographical issues like his struggle with depression and alcoholism with meditations on the emotional content of the fantastic genres. Leiber's capacity for endless self-reinvention and productive self-examination kept him, until his death, one of the most modern of his sf generation.
Used These Alternate Names: Maurice Breçon, Fric Lajber, Fritz Leiber, Jr., Fritz R. Leiber, Fritz Leiber Jun., Фриц Лейбер, F. Lieber, フリッツ・ライバー
Used These Alternate Names: Maurice Breçon, Fric Lajber, Fritz Leiber, Jr., Fritz R. Leiber, Fritz Leiber Jun., Фриц Лейбер, F. Lieber, フリッツ・ライバー
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February 18, 2018
Thanks to Peter Tillman’s review, I came across this gem of a novelette, winner of both Hugo (1968) and Nebula (1967) awards. A tantalizing subject – playing craps with Death – in a sublimely beautiful writing.
“It was the man in black, their master, who was the deadly one, the kind of man you knew at a glance you couldn't touch and live.[…] For it was the eyes that were the most impressive feature. All great gamblers have dark-shadowed deep-set eyes. But this one's eyes were sunk so deep you couldn't even be sure you were getting a gleam of them. They were inscrutability incarnate. They were unfathomable. They were like black holes.””
I don’t know to whom give credit for this picture, but it’s too perfect here not to share it.
Note: It was first published in Dangerous Visions anthology, edited by Harlan Elison in 1967.
“It was the man in black, their master, who was the deadly one, the kind of man you knew at a glance you couldn't touch and live.[…] For it was the eyes that were the most impressive feature. All great gamblers have dark-shadowed deep-set eyes. But this one's eyes were sunk so deep you couldn't even be sure you were getting a gleam of them. They were inscrutability incarnate. They were unfathomable. They were like black holes.””
I don’t know to whom give credit for this picture, but it’s too perfect here not to share it.
Note: It was first published in Dangerous Visions anthology, edited by Harlan Elison in 1967.
March 7, 2023
His masterwork, IMO, and one of the finest SF/F stories ever written. Won both the Hugo & Nebula awards in 1968.
Joe Slattermill in Night Town:
"At first Night Town seemed as dead as the rest of Ironmine, but then he noticed a faint glow, sick as the vampire lights but more feverish, and with it a jumping music, tiny at first as a jazz for jitterbugging ants. ...."
The Big Mushrooms, sweating as the Big Gambler raises the ante:
" ... the dice-girl, skinnier and taller and longer armed than his Wife even, didn't seem to be wearing much but a pair of long white gloves. She was all right if you went for the type that isn't much more than pale skin over bones with breasts like china doorknobs. ... "
The only discordant notes in this wonderful story are some incongruous pulp-SF images, and maybe that's just me. 1967 story, so older than many potential new readers! A near-perfect story, I think.
"Then he turned and headed straight for home, but he took the long way, around the world."
Bravo!
[My 2002 review. Read many times.]
Many reprints: http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cg...
First published in the landmark anthology "Dangerous Visions."
Joe Slattermill in Night Town:
"At first Night Town seemed as dead as the rest of Ironmine, but then he noticed a faint glow, sick as the vampire lights but more feverish, and with it a jumping music, tiny at first as a jazz for jitterbugging ants. ...."
The Big Mushrooms, sweating as the Big Gambler raises the ante:
" ... the dice-girl, skinnier and taller and longer armed than his Wife even, didn't seem to be wearing much but a pair of long white gloves. She was all right if you went for the type that isn't much more than pale skin over bones with breasts like china doorknobs. ... "
The only discordant notes in this wonderful story are some incongruous pulp-SF images, and maybe that's just me. 1967 story, so older than many potential new readers! A near-perfect story, I think.
"Then he turned and headed straight for home, but he took the long way, around the world."
Bravo!
[My 2002 review. Read many times.]
Many reprints: http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cg...
First published in the landmark anthology "Dangerous Visions."
June 6, 2024
Εκεί που αναρωτιέσαι γιατί ο συγγραφέας μπήκε στον κόπο να γράψει μία ιστορία για ένα τζογαδόρο, συνειδητοποιείς ότι διαβάζεις την έβδομη σφραγίδα... με ζάρια
March 11, 2018
https://nwhyte.livejournal.com/2950760.html
"Gonna Roll The Bones" by Fritz Leiber won the Hugo and Nebula awards for Best Novelette presented in 1968, beating Harlan Ellison's story "Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes" in both cases.
More significantly, perhaps, it was one of thirty-odd stories included in Harlan Ellison's famous Dangerous Visions anthology. This book dominated the awards that year, with five stories nominated in all three short fiction categories for the Hugo and winning two (beaten in the third by Ellison's own superb "I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream") and four nominations again scoring two wins in the Nebula awards (with the other short fiction award there being taken by Michael Moorcock's outstanding time-travel tale, "Behold the Man"). Although looking back at it now, it's difficult to appreciate quite what made the stories seem so radical almost forty years ago (some find them dated, others incomprehensible), it's reasonable to suppose that "Gonna Roll The Bones" owed at least some of the credit for its awards to reflected glory from the rest of the collection.
It also of course owes something to Leiber's general popularity and the contribution he'd made to the genre over the years. He had started early: researching this piece, I found a quotation which is a bit marginal to "Gonna Roll The Bones" but sufficiently interesting to include here:
"Young Fritz (twenty-five, a University of Chicago graduate, and entering his father's profession) has one of the keenest minds I have ever encountered... His understanding of the profound emotions behind the groping for cosmic concepts surpasses that of almost anyone else with whom I've discussed the matter; and his own tales and poems, while not without marks of the beginner, shew infinite insight and promise."
The quotation is from an unsent letter found, after he died, in the writing desk of H.P. Lovecraft.
The funny thing is that "Gonna Roll The Bones" is not really such a special story. Ellison says in his introduction that "it singlehandedly explains why lines of demarcation between fantasy and science fiction can seldom be drawn". No it doesn't; its a straightforward fantasy story, with a couple of references to spaceships and Martian creatures for background colour. I think it is a better story than "Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes" which it beat for both awards; but I think that several of its other competitors have shown better staying power - Philip K Dick's "Faith of our Fathers", nominated for the Hugo, where Dick managed unusually successfully to marry his usual themes of paranoia, drugs, and the questionable nature of reality with an actual plot which makes sense; and two Nebula nominations by Roger Zelazny, the grim romances of "The Keys to December" and "This Mortal Mountain" (the latter a superb tale let down badly by a silly ending). I noted this also with Leiber's "Catch That Zeppelin", which won both Hugo and Nebula a few years later. Interesting that Leiber, who was born in 1910, was the second oldest of the contributors to Dangerous Visions (the oldest by some way was Miriam DeFord, born in 1888!).
Having said that it's not such a special story, "Gonna Roll The Bones" is still a Leiber story, and is best read for style not content. With the first paragraph, a single 60-word sentence, you're in the action:
"Suddenly Joe Slattermill knew for sure he'd have to get out quick or else blow his top and knock out with the shrapnel of his skull the props and patches holding up his decaying home, that was like a house of big wooden and plaster and wallpaper cards except for the huge fireplace and ovens and chimney across the kitchen from him."
It breaks all the rules of good sentence structure and does so with vivid, graphic effect; I can't do it better justice than Michael Swanwick, who wrote:
"Fast and cocky, dancing on the fine line between virtuosity and failure, it evokes folk-tale archetypes and harsh realism both white simultaneously throwing the reader bodily into the story with a quick tour of the protagonist his house, and his predicament. A bravura performance such as this could be sunk by a misplaced comma. But nothing is out of place, unsure, or unclear."
The story is full of arresting images - the dice whose faces look like miniature skulls; the sinister presence of the Big Gambler, and the dice hanging in his eye sockets, "rattling like big seeds in a big gourd not quite yet dry"; the last sentence as well - "Then he turned and headed straight for home, but he took the long way, around the world." And the description of the gambling in The Boneyard is unforgettable.
The theme of a mortal man playing games with the devil for high stakes, is a very old one: cards and chess (The Seventh Seal) are popular candidates, but dice have a history here too, long pre-dating the Flying Dutchman - I've even found a twelfth century example (from Caesarius of Heisterbach's Dialogue on Miracles) - and, stretching a point, the Book of Job can be considered a taproot text. (Bill and Ted, of course, beat Death at both Twister and Battleships in the course of their Bogus Journey). According to Leigh Hidell on rasfc, Leiber got an important piece of jargon wrong at the climax of the story - you don't "crap out", you "seven out". Of course, as Frank M Robinson points out, the addiction that he was "really" writing about was alcohol, not gambling.
But I feel that despite the superb style and the passion of the central narrative, the story is let down by a few important details. First of all, the symbolism of what's actually happening in The Boneyard isn't very clear. The Big Gambler, vividly and unforgettably portrayed, is the Devil, of course; but then who is Mr Bones, the proprietor? If he is Death, then why is it not he, rather than the Big Gambler, who is represented by a skeleton? Are the chips meant to be other damned souls, or what? And what about the poet chap who gets gratuitously killed off - does he represent anyone in particular, or just local coloration? Perhaps I demand too much of my allegories, but this left me unsatisfied.
Second, the characters are all pretty unlikeable. Joe Slattermill sets off to deceive his wife, who he beats; she and her mother and even the cat are all pretty unpleasant house-mates anyway; the denizens of The Boneyard are just plain evil. In the hands of another author, it would be very difficult to care what happened to these people (as Dorothy Heydt might put it).
Third, the framing narrative simply adds to my confusion about What Is Really Going On. So the whole thing was a spell put on Joe by his Wife, his Mother and (for some reason) the cat, "to let him get a little ways away and feel half a man, and then come diving home with his fingers burned"? So where does the bread come into it? And if the Big Gambler was in fact just magicked bakery, then where did the rest of the crew in The Boneyard come from, especially the poet chap? Leiber himself provides an answer of sorts in his Dangerous Visions Afterword, but it doesn't really help me:
"The story of the bogeyman is the oldest and best in the world, because it is the story of courage, of fear vanquished by knowledge gained by plunging into the unknown at risk or seeming risk... For the modern American male, as for Joe Slattermill, the ultimate bogey may turn out to be the Mom figure: domineering-dependent Wife or Mother, exaggerating their claims on him beyond all reason and bound."
This must surely carry the blame for inspiring some of the tedious rants of Dave Sim in the later issues of Cerebus the Aardvark. I have big difficulty in seeing Joe Slattermill as a sympathetic representation of the American Everyman, and I do hope Leiber didn't really mean this.
More helpfully, Leiber goes on to characterise the story as an "American tall-tale", so my desperate attempts to Make Sense Of It All may have been misguided from the start, and I should just have sat back and allowed the narrative to wash over me.
Rereading it many years later, the point that jumped out at me is the sheer misogyny of the story. I muttered above about the unnamed horror of the Wife and Mother; here are the two young women in the Boneyard:
"Back a little from the other end was the nakedest change-girl yet and the only one he'd seen whose tray, slung from her bare shoulders and indenting her belly just below her breasts, was stacked with gold in gleaming little towers and with jet-black chips. While the dice-girl, skinnier and taller and longer armed than his Wife even, didn't seem to be wearing much but a pair of long white gloves. She was all right if you went for the type that isn't much more than pale skin over bones with breasts like china doorknobs. ... Snapping his fingers at the nearest silver change-girl, Joe traded all his greasy dollars for an equal number of pale chips and tweaked her left nipple for luck. She playfully snapped her teeth toward his fingers."
I bet she did.
"Gonna Roll The Bones" by Fritz Leiber won the Hugo and Nebula awards for Best Novelette presented in 1968, beating Harlan Ellison's story "Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes" in both cases.
More significantly, perhaps, it was one of thirty-odd stories included in Harlan Ellison's famous Dangerous Visions anthology. This book dominated the awards that year, with five stories nominated in all three short fiction categories for the Hugo and winning two (beaten in the third by Ellison's own superb "I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream") and four nominations again scoring two wins in the Nebula awards (with the other short fiction award there being taken by Michael Moorcock's outstanding time-travel tale, "Behold the Man"). Although looking back at it now, it's difficult to appreciate quite what made the stories seem so radical almost forty years ago (some find them dated, others incomprehensible), it's reasonable to suppose that "Gonna Roll The Bones" owed at least some of the credit for its awards to reflected glory from the rest of the collection.
It also of course owes something to Leiber's general popularity and the contribution he'd made to the genre over the years. He had started early: researching this piece, I found a quotation which is a bit marginal to "Gonna Roll The Bones" but sufficiently interesting to include here:
"Young Fritz (twenty-five, a University of Chicago graduate, and entering his father's profession) has one of the keenest minds I have ever encountered... His understanding of the profound emotions behind the groping for cosmic concepts surpasses that of almost anyone else with whom I've discussed the matter; and his own tales and poems, while not without marks of the beginner, shew infinite insight and promise."
The quotation is from an unsent letter found, after he died, in the writing desk of H.P. Lovecraft.
The funny thing is that "Gonna Roll The Bones" is not really such a special story. Ellison says in his introduction that "it singlehandedly explains why lines of demarcation between fantasy and science fiction can seldom be drawn". No it doesn't; its a straightforward fantasy story, with a couple of references to spaceships and Martian creatures for background colour. I think it is a better story than "Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes" which it beat for both awards; but I think that several of its other competitors have shown better staying power - Philip K Dick's "Faith of our Fathers", nominated for the Hugo, where Dick managed unusually successfully to marry his usual themes of paranoia, drugs, and the questionable nature of reality with an actual plot which makes sense; and two Nebula nominations by Roger Zelazny, the grim romances of "The Keys to December" and "This Mortal Mountain" (the latter a superb tale let down badly by a silly ending). I noted this also with Leiber's "Catch That Zeppelin", which won both Hugo and Nebula a few years later. Interesting that Leiber, who was born in 1910, was the second oldest of the contributors to Dangerous Visions (the oldest by some way was Miriam DeFord, born in 1888!).
Having said that it's not such a special story, "Gonna Roll The Bones" is still a Leiber story, and is best read for style not content. With the first paragraph, a single 60-word sentence, you're in the action:
"Suddenly Joe Slattermill knew for sure he'd have to get out quick or else blow his top and knock out with the shrapnel of his skull the props and patches holding up his decaying home, that was like a house of big wooden and plaster and wallpaper cards except for the huge fireplace and ovens and chimney across the kitchen from him."
It breaks all the rules of good sentence structure and does so with vivid, graphic effect; I can't do it better justice than Michael Swanwick, who wrote:
"Fast and cocky, dancing on the fine line between virtuosity and failure, it evokes folk-tale archetypes and harsh realism both white simultaneously throwing the reader bodily into the story with a quick tour of the protagonist his house, and his predicament. A bravura performance such as this could be sunk by a misplaced comma. But nothing is out of place, unsure, or unclear."
The story is full of arresting images - the dice whose faces look like miniature skulls; the sinister presence of the Big Gambler, and the dice hanging in his eye sockets, "rattling like big seeds in a big gourd not quite yet dry"; the last sentence as well - "Then he turned and headed straight for home, but he took the long way, around the world." And the description of the gambling in The Boneyard is unforgettable.
The theme of a mortal man playing games with the devil for high stakes, is a very old one: cards and chess (The Seventh Seal) are popular candidates, but dice have a history here too, long pre-dating the Flying Dutchman - I've even found a twelfth century example (from Caesarius of Heisterbach's Dialogue on Miracles) - and, stretching a point, the Book of Job can be considered a taproot text. (Bill and Ted, of course, beat Death at both Twister and Battleships in the course of their Bogus Journey). According to Leigh Hidell on rasfc, Leiber got an important piece of jargon wrong at the climax of the story - you don't "crap out", you "seven out". Of course, as Frank M Robinson points out, the addiction that he was "really" writing about was alcohol, not gambling.
But I feel that despite the superb style and the passion of the central narrative, the story is let down by a few important details. First of all, the symbolism of what's actually happening in The Boneyard isn't very clear. The Big Gambler, vividly and unforgettably portrayed, is the Devil, of course; but then who is Mr Bones, the proprietor? If he is Death, then why is it not he, rather than the Big Gambler, who is represented by a skeleton? Are the chips meant to be other damned souls, or what? And what about the poet chap who gets gratuitously killed off - does he represent anyone in particular, or just local coloration? Perhaps I demand too much of my allegories, but this left me unsatisfied.
Second, the characters are all pretty unlikeable. Joe Slattermill sets off to deceive his wife, who he beats; she and her mother and even the cat are all pretty unpleasant house-mates anyway; the denizens of The Boneyard are just plain evil. In the hands of another author, it would be very difficult to care what happened to these people (as Dorothy Heydt might put it).
Third, the framing narrative simply adds to my confusion about What Is Really Going On. So the whole thing was a spell put on Joe by his Wife, his Mother and (for some reason) the cat, "to let him get a little ways away and feel half a man, and then come diving home with his fingers burned"? So where does the bread come into it? And if the Big Gambler was in fact just magicked bakery, then where did the rest of the crew in The Boneyard come from, especially the poet chap? Leiber himself provides an answer of sorts in his Dangerous Visions Afterword, but it doesn't really help me:
"The story of the bogeyman is the oldest and best in the world, because it is the story of courage, of fear vanquished by knowledge gained by plunging into the unknown at risk or seeming risk... For the modern American male, as for Joe Slattermill, the ultimate bogey may turn out to be the Mom figure: domineering-dependent Wife or Mother, exaggerating their claims on him beyond all reason and bound."
This must surely carry the blame for inspiring some of the tedious rants of Dave Sim in the later issues of Cerebus the Aardvark. I have big difficulty in seeing Joe Slattermill as a sympathetic representation of the American Everyman, and I do hope Leiber didn't really mean this.
More helpfully, Leiber goes on to characterise the story as an "American tall-tale", so my desperate attempts to Make Sense Of It All may have been misguided from the start, and I should just have sat back and allowed the narrative to wash over me.
Rereading it many years later, the point that jumped out at me is the sheer misogyny of the story. I muttered above about the unnamed horror of the Wife and Mother; here are the two young women in the Boneyard:
"Back a little from the other end was the nakedest change-girl yet and the only one he'd seen whose tray, slung from her bare shoulders and indenting her belly just below her breasts, was stacked with gold in gleaming little towers and with jet-black chips. While the dice-girl, skinnier and taller and longer armed than his Wife even, didn't seem to be wearing much but a pair of long white gloves. She was all right if you went for the type that isn't much more than pale skin over bones with breasts like china doorknobs. ... Snapping his fingers at the nearest silver change-girl, Joe traded all his greasy dollars for an equal number of pale chips and tweaked her left nipple for luck. She playfully snapped her teeth toward his fingers."
I bet she did.
July 26, 2021
*Read as part of the Dangerous Visions collection. (short story, not the children's book)
A man plays craps with Death. Not sure what the point of this story is, but it’s incredibly evocative and one of the few stories in this collection that really stuck with me.
A man plays craps with Death. Not sure what the point of this story is, but it’s incredibly evocative and one of the few stories in this collection that really stuck with me.
Read
July 14, 2008Magical Realist elements in picture books -- see http://bigblogofmarvel.blogspot.com/s... Wiesner
February 4, 2016
Ne loše, ali i ne dobro! Malo mi ta povezanost "rerne" pećnice i kruha njegove žene onako previše i za moj ukus. Kužim alegoriju, ali ipak...
December 30, 2024
An enjoyable short story that I breezed through this morning. Recommended.
June 3, 2023
The illustrations in this picture book could be too scary for very young ones, and the text would be over their heads anyway. The story is about a man gambling against a creature with a skull face (the devil?).
September 27, 2023
I'm always a sucker for a game against the devil, and this one was incredibly well written. It was supremely tense, and even though I don't know much of anything about dice games I was able to follow it pretty well. I would've liked to see more of the speculative fiction aspect, the very brief moments of surrealism (specifically, the Big Gambler's description and the bizarre spacey table) were super interesting. The afterword from Leiber was strange and felt not only misogynistic but irrelevant to the story as well; I don't fully see how the bogeyman is a domineering mother/wife here when it felt more like an allegory for gambling addiction.
July 25, 2018
Most reviewers are talking about the story itself -- which is awesome -- and not this illustrated book.
This is a oddest choice for a kids book I've ever seen. But for sheer chutzpah, it's worth a look. I dare say that an article about how this even got made would be fascinating. How did the pitch go? "It's a story about throwing dice with the devil and then abandoning your family! Kids will love it, amirite!!"
That being said, I hope they made their money back.
This is a oddest choice for a kids book I've ever seen. But for sheer chutzpah, it's worth a look. I dare say that an article about how this even got made would be fascinating. How did the pitch go? "It's a story about throwing dice with the devil and then abandoning your family! Kids will love it, amirite!!"
That being said, I hope they made their money back.
March 7, 2023
This nighttime parable of sin city from the wrong side of the railway tracks is mesmerically atmospheric, intensely descriptive and richly overwritten.
I agree that the space metaphors clogged up the lyricism. Maybe he had to include as hooks for the attention of Hugo and Nebula committees. Otherwise sublime writing that even Ray Bradbury would have been proud to claim. An example of short story telling at its very best.
I agree that the space metaphors clogged up the lyricism. Maybe he had to include as hooks for the attention of Hugo and Nebula committees. Otherwise sublime writing that even Ray Bradbury would have been proud to claim. An example of short story telling at its very best.
April 21, 2022
Loved the idea of the story and it was a delightfully surprising read. Higher secondary students would enjoy pulling. Artois mythology and ideologies from the text and looking at the morals of the story. Personally I liked the grimy figures and illustration was harsh and grim to match.
March 6, 2023
Gonna Roll the Bones (the short story) is indeed one of my favorite short stories, ever. It's a kind of delightful perfect metaphor, a competition with the devil narrative that doesn't go quite the way one would expect.
December 18, 2025
Didn't expect to read something dark, strange and serious. The story is not for kids. It's basically a guy experiencing something paranormal in a gambling house. Of course, the stake will be his soul. I couldn't make out of the ending but it's a weird and fascinating read. The art is just ok.
December 13, 2017
David Weisner is one of my favorite illustrators. From what I understand, this book was essentially his illustration thesis project. Pretty cool.
December 10, 2016
An aesthetically beautiful story spoiled by its beginning.
September 8, 2014
I was a bit disappointed in this one. It might be different if I had read the Fritz Leiber story it's based on, but it's a children's book, so it seems like it should stand on its own well enough. The art isn't David Weisner's more current, familiar style but was still compelling enough; my problem with it was that I didn't care about (or dislike) Joe Slattermill and thus had no investment in the story. I do wonder if I might have liked it better with only the pictures to go on and without the text, especially as the final line just left me puzzled with it's abrupt vagueness.
September 25, 2013
When I first picked up the book, I thought it was going to take place in a graveyard. I wasn't sure exactly what it was going to be about but didn't think it was going to be about gambling. There were hidden messages in the book and honestly I am still a bit confused on what the whole story meant. Yeah I understand it but don't think I got the whole gist of the story and understand the message.
I was shocked when I was reading the story at the amount of detail that was put into the pictures and story. I am used to Wiesner's wordless picture books and this story had a lot to say. The amount of detail that were in the pictures amazed me due to the fact that it was all drawn in pencil on vellum. The story had a lot of detail but I think I would enjoy it more like his other books; wordless.
Joe is the main character who seems to have a gambling problem which his mother and wife do not agree with. The "Boneyard" was a new place for him that he gambled at which ends up leading him into trouble and possibly gambling away his life.
I was shocked when I was reading the story at the amount of detail that was put into the pictures and story. I am used to Wiesner's wordless picture books and this story had a lot to say. The amount of detail that were in the pictures amazed me due to the fact that it was all drawn in pencil on vellum. The story had a lot of detail but I think I would enjoy it more like his other books; wordless.
Joe is the main character who seems to have a gambling problem which his mother and wife do not agree with. The "Boneyard" was a new place for him that he gambled at which ends up leading him into trouble and possibly gambling away his life.
February 27, 2013
Unexceptional art. Not entirely sure the subject matter was appropriate for the age group (Joe goes into town to GAMBLE his troubles away, ultimately loses, and skulks by not going home to his wife).
I was more interested in the world we didn't see in this book: the neon signs and promised spaceships (those references seemed terribly misplaced in a book that looks set in the early 1900s).
Can't say the ending was very fitting.
Do ghosts run this world? I mean, if they did, that might make a little more sense.
Authors of children's books shouldn't be allowed to get away with bad writing and really vague story lines. There can be morals. There can be lessons. But it should be concise because we're trying to grow readers with these books! How are children going to be expected to enjoy reading when the stories are weak and the writing is so-so??
Whoops. Review became a rant. My apologies.
But the rating stays.
I was more interested in the world we didn't see in this book: the neon signs and promised spaceships (those references seemed terribly misplaced in a book that looks set in the early 1900s).
Can't say the ending was very fitting.
Do ghosts run this world? I mean, if they did, that might make a little more sense.
Authors of children's books shouldn't be allowed to get away with bad writing and really vague story lines. There can be morals. There can be lessons. But it should be concise because we're trying to grow readers with these books! How are children going to be expected to enjoy reading when the stories are weak and the writing is so-so??
Whoops. Review became a rant. My apologies.
But the rating stays.
May 16, 2016
I have an 'in-between' book I read from time to time. It's called 'The Science Fiction Hall of Fame Volume 3: Nebula Winners 1965 -1969.' I'd read the novelet 'Gonna Roll the Bones' years before when I read it in a Hugo winners collection. I read it again and was checking online to see if this ever got expanded into a book when I saw a children's book. I thought, "No Way!" So I took it out and there, cleaned up a little, it was! Interesting. Linda didn't like it and thought it wasn't appropriate for kids. I think it's OK. Kids like scary stories once in a while.
Our library has a new policy where they self-renew your books for you. I like it in one way for the convenience but it can make you lazy about returning books. Now it can't be renewed anymore and I have to take it back on a work day, which I don't like to do. I guess I need to get caught up on my Goodreads book reviews!
Our library has a new policy where they self-renew your books for you. I like it in one way for the convenience but it can make you lazy about returning books. Now it can't be renewed anymore and I have to take it back on a work day, which I don't like to do. I guess I need to get caught up on my Goodreads book reviews!
December 3, 2014
Being a gambler myself this book peaked an initial interest in myself as an adult. The details and story line is fairly complex and mature for children in my opinion. On that note I am going to rate this one a 3/5. The illustrations are interesting and unique in a rugged dark sketch like fashion which fits the mood of the story accordingly. Readers are taken along a thrill ride as the main character of the story is caught up in a gamble at the highest stakes of risking his life. I would not recommend this book to the majority of children but it does have its place in instilling valuable lessons early on in certain families.
August 31, 2016
Yet another beautifully illustrated book done by David. My teacher was telling us a story about David and how this was actually a project that he did when he was in college, at the end of the story my teacher proudly opened the book and pointed to the main character and said that he was the one who posed for that picture. Personally for me the story was not something that really interested myself, but that does not mean that it should be passed by, so pick it up see what David was working on while in college.
September 4, 2012
Malcolm says, "I like that one of the men was a skeleton and I liked the game that they played and I liked that that man got a lot of dollars and then the skeleton guy got a lot of dollars. I liked the illustrations and I liked that the swinging door turned into a steel door."
October 30, 2010
I almost hate to call this a children's book due to the subject matter, but still, it's a fascinating story, and a good one to read near Halloween! I really like the pencil sketches too!
December 29, 2010
I can see this as a nice read aloud for Halloween, but only if you have a way to make sure the kids can see the pencil drawings and read the afterward by David Wiesner.
May 3, 2011
I actually like this book, I think the spookiness would be a great read aloud for Halloween.
April 1, 2011
I knew that he gambled with death at the end but really... I could not understand the moral of the story.. Until I searched it up and came to this wonderful website... hehe
July 22, 2011
Creepy. I would have loved this as a kid. The illustrations are very Arthur Rackham, which is another reason I like it. I think it would scare little kids.
October 5, 2012
this book may help kids understand the seduction of gambling and the troubles it can cause. A humble man is drawn to the dice and has to beat the devil or else it'll cost him his soul. Very good.
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