But if they work, I think we’ll try to get to an even dozen.” “If no one buys the first four, it won’t go on much longer. “We have three in the pipeline, and we’re about to add the fourth,” he explains. Gargoyle ends with a teaser for book two, The Slither Sisters, which is due out in January.

“I tried to appropriate all the things that are fun about Lovecraft and age appropriate to middle schoolers,” Rekulak says. Professor Gargoyle opens with the main character, Robert Arthur, beginning seventh grade at a new school, where in addition to the usual junior-high horrors he also encounters tentacled creatures, ancient monsters, and gateways to a parallel universe. I started thinking about how it would be really cool on a series of books, and I figured the sweet spot for that is 10-year-old boys, so you’re talking about a middle-grade series.” The lenticulars we had when we were growing up, like in a Cracker Jack box, were two-frame animations they now can have 16 frames in a single image. “I found out that instead of projectors or all the crazy things I was imagining, they were using a very fancy version of old-fashioned lenticular technology. “My son and I were looking at all these cool portraits at the Haunted Mansion,” which appear to morph from staid to spooky, he explains. Lovecraft, Rekulak says the new series was originally inspired not by the early-20th-century author’s otherworldly horror stories, but by a visit to Disney World about two years ago. Gargoyle is the first middle-grade novel from the indie house, which is best known for its offbeat bestsellers like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and the YA hit Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, both of which Rekulak also created.Ī longtime fan of H.P. The book is the first installment in the Tales from Lovecraft Middle School series, which Quirk associate publisher and creative director Jason Rekulak both conceptualized and authored, under the pseudonym Charles Gilman.

If you visited the Quirk Books booth at BEA earlier this year, you may have noticed the two-by-three-foot blowup of the lenticular cover for Professor Gargoyle, which shows a suit-wearing science teacher transforming into a red-faced, horned demon as you walk by.

Professor gargoyle