The sun-bleached, lopsided wooden town sign decorates the side of the new highway through the desert. Someone has thoughtfully painted the population statistics on it: 5000 3502 2006 1545 810 200. Grymm, the dripping, blood-red paint reveals, is a place you leave.
Instead, thanks to a job offer that George Lipton and his wife cannot afford to ignore, squabbling step-siblings Jacob Daniels, 11, and Wilhelmina Lipton, 13, are rushing towards it. And worst of all they have to put up with their hated, caterwauling six-month-old half-brother, Bryan.
Grymm perches on the edge of the desert and from the moment Jacob and Mina enter the town they sense something is wrong. From Thespa Grymm, the grotesque letting agent who seems to want to eat their baby brother, to a cafe owner whose milkshakes might contain actual maggots and the creepy, hairless butcher, Cleaver Flay, all is not what it seems.
Then, overnight, baby Bryan disappears, as if he never even existed. And that’s when things get seriously weird.
Full of action and dark humor, GRYMM has been described as “is unlike pretty much any other book I have read ... if you like your stories to be darker than a city banker's soul then GRYMM is for you. This book is one of those that really does need to be read to be believed, and I only wish I could come up with a more coherent way of describing it. Dark, macabre, bizarre, hilarious, chilling - none of those words are really enough ...”
The Guardian online said: “I was blown away. Honestly, I didn't think, when receiving this book in the mail, that it would be so … wow ... I'm still recoiling from the ending ... the best of its kind. Keith Austin deserves to take his place, up there with Stephen King and Neil Gaiman.”
Inis, the Children’s Books Ireland Magazine said: “Grymm is wonderfully entertaining, superbly imaginative and perfectly paced ... but it is the larger-than-life characters which make this book a delight. They are the timeless, instinctive horror of fairy tales made flesh in a modern day setting, and they make for a genuinely scary story. David Lynch meets Brothers Grimm, and highly recommended.”
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