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This is one of the most bizarre books I've ever read.

The fantasy elements are all rather ordinary. There’s a secret world beyond that of our own; this is a standard trope of the genre. C.S Lewis would soon follow suit and inspire later generations. But the point is the Land of Oz is just weird.

Seems like a bland criticism, though the entire point of the plot is to have good triumph over evil. But what is evil? Beyond the actual name of the antagonist, the Wicked Witch of the West, we don’t actually know much about her. Is she really that bad? It seems unusual to create such an evilly induced character and then have her preform no evil; it sort of makes the whole moral of the story seem questionable.

Simply put, an apt summary of the story would be: “a little girl meets three freaks and goes on a killing spree in a fucked up world.� Indeed, the heroes of the tale aren’t exactly what I’d define as good.

Are they evil heroes?



Dorothy is completely unheroic. She kills another “evil witch� on her entry into the land; her first act is to accidently commit murder. All her success is down to unbelievable blind luck; it gets to the point that she performs a completely random action, like throwing water at someone, and she somehow saves the day. It’d just odd. The Tin Woodsman is an even stranger figure. We have an entire chapter devoted to the saving of a colony of mice; yet, at one point he cuts a leopard’s head off despite travelling in the company of a lion. Does this sound like children’s fiction? For me this was slightly hypocritical. It’s like the author is saying we should be nice to some animals only. It made little sense. And then there’s the whole separate issue of how the woodman managed to survive so many decapitations�..

I can understand why this book was so popular to its earlier audiences; it’s a very early attempt at fantasy, so there wasn’t a great deal quite like this around at the time. I think for a child who just sees the basic plot of this, they would easily become lost. But when you read it as an adult you just can’t help but think “this isn’t right.� I could go on. I could go on to explain how the structure is a slight mess. Each chapter is almost like its own enclosed story that’s could be read section by section, each night before bed. But as an actual novel, the progression of chapters really is quite poor. I picked out two points where the novel really should have ended; yet, it kept going on when the climax had finished and all momentum has been lost.

For me this book is an example of an overly hyped cultural phenomenon. Many people claim to love this book, but many haven’t actually read it. Everyone my age I have ever met has watched the film at some point in their life; the basic narrative is embodied into their cultural psyche, which happens with many literary classics of this type. The point is the book here is a very different thing. I implore everyone who bases their knowledge, and perhaps love, of this on the movie to actually sit down and read the horrendous work in question; then you may see what it actually is: a vile little story that is accidently evil.

This one was quite a shocker!