A children's novel that reinvents Jack of beanstalk fame. This time the brave, clever, and good-hearted lad matches wits with seven comical giants, each a figuration of one of the seven traditional human failings (including Sloth, the lazy poet; the ever-incensed Mrs. Roth; and Avaritch, the greedy troglodyte). It's a seriously playful book, and will be translated into Dutch, French, and Portuguese.
Read
Chapter Three below.
The Terrible Glutton, illustration by Carll Cnuet
Going on, going on, and Jack was getting hungry. He perked up happy when the cow found them a tree with pears all tasty ripe. The cow was hungry, too. She raised her head to eat but couldn’t reach the fruit, so Jack climbed up the tree and tossed some down.
Chomp, chomp.
Jack watched her large jaws work the pears. Even if she wasn’t much for talk, Jack guessed the cow was just about the best friend any boy had ever had. Look at all she did for him! She carried him around all day, then lay beside him warm at night, and in the morning gave him milk. She did all this, plus never once told Jack that he was bad. Who wouldn’t love a friend like that?
The cow looked up at Jack, wanting him to throw another pear.
Chomp, chomp.
After she’d had her fill, the cow went to a nearby stream and drank while Jack stayed in the tree and ate.
Chomp, chomp.
Those pears were awful good, the sweetest Jack had ever tasted, and he couldn’t get enough.
Chomp, chomp.
Jack stuffed his face till he got sick and burped, the smell of which was carried downwind to a giant, which was not a lucky chance.
Sniff! Sniff!
This was the Terrible Glutton and he was a just monstrous beast that only lived to eat and eat and eat. Everywhere he went, the Glutton gobbled anything he came across and never even stopped to cook it. He swallowed birds and bears and kitty cats down live. He ate up all the farmers’ crops and all the soil to boot. Whatever he could grab, the Glutton didn’t care, he’d even rip a tree from out the ground and swallow it down whole!
SLOBBER SLOBBER SNORT GRUNT GRUNT!
The Glutton ate so much that everything on him was fat, fat, fat. His nose was fat, his ears were fat, his eyes were fat, and every single hair on him was fat, fat, fat! He had so many chins he couldn’t see his shoulders! His belly was so fat it covered up his legs like he had on a skirt! You never saw a more disgusting and revolting creature than that Glutton in your whole entire life!
Sniff! Sniff!
The Glutton smelled Jack’s burp and knew at once it was a boy’s, and that gave him a smile. His favorite food!
Poor Jack! He never knew what hit him. Never had a chance. That giant bore down fast and plucked Jack from the tree and dangled him above his mouth like Jack was just a grape.
SLOBBER SLOBBER SNORT GRUNT GRUNT!
“Hey! What are you doing?” cried Jack.
“I’m going to eat you,” said the Glutton.
“You can’t do that!”
“I’m the Terrible Glutton. I can do anything I want.”
“That’s no fair! You have to give me a chance to save myself!”
The Glutton paused to think on that and then decided he could have a bit of fun before he ate the boy. “I’ll tell you what,” the giant said. “If you come up with something I can’t eat, I set you free. If you fail, I eat you up. You get three chances. Deal?”
“Deal,” said Jack, and hid a smirk that showed he thought that this would be a cinch.
The giant smirked as well. He knew Jack couldn’t win. There was nothing that the Glutton couldn’t eat. Nothing!
Jack got started right away. He mixed up moss and mold and mildew with a bunch of slimy snails and leeches and a mess of green gunk from a pond as well as other things too gross to mention, things that stank so bad Jack had to hold his nose.
P.U.!
Jack told the giant, “No one with a brain would eat this.”
“Too bad for you, ‘cause I don’t have a brain,” the Glutton said, and stuck his face inside the muck and sucked up every bit of it. “Not bad,” he said, and licked his lips. “What’s next?”
Oh, no!
This time Jack got every poison thing that he could find—deadly snakes, spiders, mushrooms, and berries—and chopped them up together for a salad, saying, “This here is a dish to die for.”
“We’ll see about that,” the Glutton said, and shoved it in his big fat mouth and bolted it right down. Jack watched the giant’s face go gray and squinch up in such awful pain that Jack was sure he was about to drop down dead. But then instead the giant let loose with a most gigantic fart, a fart so huge that it was like the thunder, blew a crater in the ground, and scared Jack half to death.
BOOM!
After all the air was clear, the Glutton sat there smiling, rubbed his tummy, asked Jack were there maybe seconds.
Oh, no again!
Two chances down and only one to go. Jack was sure his goose was cooked and stalled as best he could to give himself some time to think. But all the while the Glutton drooled to see how good Jack looked to eat and finally the giant couldn’t wait another second so he said, “Time’s up! I win!” and went to stuff Jack in his mouth.
“Wait!” cried Jack. “I know a thing that you can’t eat!”
“Fat chance!”
“Yourself!” said Jack. “You cannot eat yourself!”
“I can, too!” said the giant. “And when I’m done eating me, I’m eating you!”
What happened next was not a pretty sight. The giant started with his toes. They were tastier than he expected, like sausages but crunchy. “Yum yum,” he said. Next he tucked into his legs and they were good, good, good, way juicier than drumsticks. “I should have eaten me years ago!” the Glutton cried, and gorged himself upon his belly which was so delicious that the Glutton thought he’d died and gone to heaven.
SLOBBER SLOBBER SNORT GRUNT GRUNT!
In no time flat the only part left to be eaten was the giant’s head, but how to get it in his mouth confused the Glutton and he stopped to chew the problem over.
Jack cried, “You have to eat yourself up every bit or else I win!”
“I will! I will!” And that determined Glutton got to grunting and to straining. He forced his mouth to open wider and then wider and then wider still until his upper lip inched up over the top of his head and his lower lip went underneath. “I’ve got me now!” he thought.
There comes a time in every swallow when the swallow pauses for a second as the muscles in the mouth stop working and the muscles in the throat take over. Once a swallow’s got that far, though, there is no turning back, no way to stop it, and at just that very moment, when it was too late, the Glutton figured out what was about to happen. “But if I eat me—” he said, then never made another sound except the final gulp that showed he’d swallowed his own head up inside out and disappeared.
Poof!
copyright 2004 by Sam Swope
published by Farrar Straus and Giroux
may not be reproduced without permission
