HAROLD AND THE PURPLE CRAYON

Reviewed By Special Guest Reviewer Theophilus Pratt
(Publisher — Hymenaeus House)

This instructive tale tells of a young man who all by himself creates a road which he then travels down, makes a mountain which he climbs, then saves himself from falling by conjuring a balloon which he hangs onto until he can bring into being a basket capable of supporting himself. His boundless creativity allows him to shape a whole civilization of buildings until, amusingly, he re-creates the very house he started out from and sleeps the sleep of the just, knowing that everything he has in life was fashioned by his own hand.

Amusingly, this book was sold to me as a work of fantasy when it is in fact the most realistic work of fiction I have ever encountered. If anything, it was too realistic to be fiction, a fact I found very amusing. Flipping through its pages proved to be instructive, as I began to see it was nothing more than a thinly veiled if amusing allegory for my own inimitable life.

Did I not provide myself with the only light I ever needed to walk by, as Harold did? Have I not always made my own road, and even left it when even it proved too stifling to my boundless intellect? Has not my dizzying intellectual magnitude taken me to the height of peaks so high that even I cannot long find purchase upon them? And when I fall, whom do I rely upon to prop myself up except myself?

If I am found to be apparently sinking into a morass of intellectual quagmire as Harold found himself floundering in a sea, you can bet that it is of my own devising and for my own purposes, and I will just as quickly pull myself out when the time is right for me to strike.

Like Harold, I am a master of fourth generational warfare honed over long epochs of electronic correspondence and nights spent around the table with my beloved custom Warhammer miniatures. Like Harold, I move in dimensions that the limited minds of the hated lying SJWs cannot fathom, though it is both amusing and instructive to watch them struggle to do so.

But as I raced back and forth through the text, admiring “Harold” and his facility with his purple poison pen, I began to wonder how this book came to be. Who could have written a book that so perfectly captures every aspect of my life in its instructive allegory? There is only one man I know who has paid such attention to my doings: that arch SJW, Johnny Con himself.

Yes, this book is clearly the handiwork of John Scalzi.

I ask you, does the man’s obsession with me know no bounds? It is as amusing as it is instructive to see what depths—or rather heights—his fascination now leads him to. Under the transparent pseudonym of “Crockett Johnson” (do I even need to begin to dissect the painfully obvious allusion?), Scalzi has published a whole series of thinly veiled paeans to the civilizing influence of my plus three standard deviation intellect and supreme force of creative will.

And is it so surprising? As amusing as it is that Scalzi plays up his apparent hatred of me, it has always been apparent to anyone with the wit to see that the root of his obsession lies in jealousy, and are we jealous of what we loathe or are we jealous of that which we admire? Here we see Scalzi’s grudging admiration of me bearing fruit in a most instructive if amusing fashion.

Well, rest assured, Johnny: your efforts have not gone unnoticed. I have added this rather instructive book to the copious other evidence I have compiled in my extensive files on your obsession with me. Most amusing!

7.5/10