Gary: What on earth possessed you to buy this book?
Lissa: It’s for your collection. Look! POP-UP CEMETARY!! (pops the cemetary up in his face)
Gary: Yes, I can see that.
Lissa: Come on, it’s hilarious.
Gary: It’s kind of weird.
Lissa: I know! Look at this! POP-UP GIANT DOG! (pops the giant dog up in his face)
Gary: Actually, that was scarier in the novel.
Lissa: Well, the novel is several hundred pages long, and this is about a dozen pages of images and text and POP-UP DRACULA! (pops Dracula up in his face)
Gary: Would you stop doing that?!
Lissa: (contrite) Sorry.
Gary: It’s okay. I just don’t want to tear it or anything.
Lissa: By reacting with that extreme fright you’ve been displaying?
Gary: Yes.
Lissa: (sighs)
Gary: Seriously, who thought of this? It’s completely unsuitable for kids.
Lissa: I don’t think it’s meant for kids.
Gary: When I was a kid, pop-up books were for kids.
Lissa: I think they’ve become a kind of nostalgia thing for grown ups, these days.
Gary: I had a pop-up book about trains. It was great. Until it…. um… broke.
Lissa: My brother Paul would have loved a Dracula pop-up book. Actually, Belinda would have loved it too. Look at this… (considers, and very carefully opens and moves the book) you can repeatedly stake the Count in the last chapter, if you really want to.
Gary: I like the little pop-up bits on the half pages you fold out from the sides. The ship’s log has all these pages, and there’s pop-up ocean swell. And… (takes the book and stares closely)… I wonder how they folded that bit in…
Lissa: You just want to know how it works.
Gary: I sort of know how it works.
Lissa: You took apart that train book when you were a kid to see how it they did the pop-up stuff, didn’t you?
Gary: Um. Yeah.
Lissa: How much stuff did you destroy as a kid trying to figure out how it worked?
Gary: … a fair bit.
Lissa: How on earth did you resist pulling apart your computer when you got it?
Gary: I didnt, for the first one. After I replaced it I left it alone. I can’t afford to keep doing that sort of thing.
Lissa: I wish I could have seen that.
Gary: I’ve got something you can see.
Lissa: What’s that?
Gary: POP-UP VAMPIRE! (bares his fangs and waggles his hands in her face, pop-up Dracula style)
Lissa: *shrieks*
Gary: Ooh. Shit. Sorry.
Lissa: Jesus Gary, you … you…. (starts to laugh, then folds up giggling)
Gary: No, really, sorry. I didn’t meant to scare you.
Lissa: No, it’s cool. I deserved that. (folds up laughing again) Pop-up vampire!!!! Hey, hey look at this! POP-UP LIBRARIAN! (jumps up in his face) YOU HAVE AN OVERDUE BOOK!!!
Gary: (blinks) You’re definitely scarier than pop-up Dracula.
Lissa: That’s my mysterious librarian powers working their mojo.
Gary: Thank you for the book, Lissa.
Lissa: You are very welcome, Gary.
Buy your own POP-UP BRAM STOKER’S DRACULA!
*For newcomers, the GaryView is a review of books/films/TV/entertainment carried out as a conversation between Lissa Wilson (librarian) and Gary Hooper (vampire) , characters from my book ‘The Opposite of Life’.