Spike Magazine

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Review [published September 2003]
Angus Oblong: Creepy Suzie
Jayne Margetts
The first time I laid eyes upon the troubled cast of
Royston Vasey’s The League Of Gentlemen I almost
vomited. Such grotesque, pantomime-scarred characters,
which could turn the stomach with a flutter of the
eyelash, stirred the strings of disturbance with all and
sundry. A BAFTA Award (2000 for Production) confirmed
that comedy had found a new avenue, and that
it was okay to satirise all that was politically incorrect.
So when a copy of Angus Oblong’s Creepy Suzie And
13 Other Tragic Tales For Troubled Children landed
on the doorstep the odds were tipped in its favour.
Dysfunctionalism rocks!
P.T. Barnum was a rock god! He was an opportunist.
He was an entrepreneurial voyeurist. And by trailing
his carnival freaks across the backbone of mid-America
circa late-1800s, this vaudevillian parasite put the fun
back into fantasy, the sacred and profane.
We’ve had a host of wannabes since then; Jim
Rose’s Circus Sideshow is possibly the heir apparent,
and in TV terms Todd Browning’s unfortunate band
of merry Freaks, and then suddenly, whoosh, out of
the fictional toxic backwaters of Sacramento comes
BUY Angus Oblong books online from and
a new satirist of the grotesque with a posse who are
anything but Ivy League.
Meet Angus Oblong; 27-year-old modern day Frankenstein
with a deformity fixation and sperm donor to
the craziest family of contemporary abominations outside
of the test tube. His (first major book deal) Creepy
Suzie And 13 Other Tragic Tales For Troubled Children
salutes them for their warts-and-all-mutation-of-toxicgenetics-meets-psychotic-hearted
compassion. There’s
grotesque mutant babies, midget albino crossdressers,
siamese quadruplets, narcoleptic dogs, stupid vampires
and fun, fun, fun doses of electroshock therapy galore!
The fun figures that inhabit Creepy Suzie’s landscape
enjoy the benefits of a contaminated environment and
lifestyle. This is no Sorority House picnic peppered
with sunny Californian hormones and bleached silicon
smiles. The inhabitants of this bleak, black-and-white
cul-de-sac have flaws galore. ‘Emily Amputee’ is a
prime example: “Emily went to her doctor for her annual
checkup. Some paperwork got mixed up and they
amputated one of her legs.” Or if you favour a tale on
the homicidal side there’s always ‘Mary Had A Little
380
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