What’s the Story by Matthew Johnstone
My rating: 5/5 cats
way back in the day, when greggly and me were just starting to become besties, we discovered a mutual love of lateral thinking puzzles. i went out and bought about 40 different books full of ’em, and we would bring them with us when we were out and about and do them in line at book signings, at woodside memorial park, eating hotdogs on the steps of the NYPL…
we were the coolest kids ever.
and one year, for christmas, i made greg the best lateral thinking puzzle diorama ever. one of the coolest things i ever made. i rule.
you know what lateral thinking puzzles are, right? i don’t know if everyone is as much of a party-game nerd as i am. one person gives the situation—usually something that is the end of a “story,” and everyone gets to ask yes-or-no questions to figure out what happened: a man is found hanging from a noose twelve feet above the ground in a completely empty room. there is a puddle of water on the floor. what happened?
obviously, he was standing on a block of ice with a noose around his neck, which ice melted, killing him…eventually.
i can’t tell you how much i love these puppies. even when the answers are so far-fetched no one would ever have a chance of figuring them out.
my discovery of them came when i was about thirteen, attending basketball camp. during our breaks, we would gather on some slip of grass off the URI campus parking lot and go in a circle, playing them off one another. my favorite one from that era is this one:
a man is driving to work listening to the radio when the song playing starts skipping. he pulls over to the side of the road and shoots himself in the head. why?
answer: View Spoiler »
later in life, i got my now ex-boyfriend into them. we were driving through the mean streets of chappaqua, telling them back and forth. at one point, i decided to try my hand at creating one of my very own:
a man is found hiding in a haystack with a turkey baster and wearing a roman centurion helmet. what is the situation?
he tried to figure this one out for nearly an hour before giving up and asking me for the answer. i just shrugged and said “i don’t know. guess he was just crazy.”
he was so pissed at me.
but it was fun!!! young love is fun!!
and this book is one of my favorites. it doesn’t have a ton of puzzles; there are only 23, but it represents the fancier, giftier end of this type of thing. it would be the perfect gift for me. but i already have it.
all the puzzles are laid out with the question on the verso side and a full-page illustration on the recto. (heh. recto.) the illustrations do not hold any clues to the answer, and are all kind of horrifying: spooky, weirdly-proportioned people, gunfire, screaming people with piano-key teeth. it’s pretty dark stuff. which is fitting, because for some reason, lateral thinking puzzles usually involve mysterious death, but they are still strikingly dark visuals. and then all the answers are in the back, next to a tinier version of the same picture.
it is a beautiful, red clothbound dustjacketless book with a very good selection of puzzles. believe me, when you have 40 books on the same kind of thing, it can be difficult to discover new ones. but there were several new to me in here. and i love that these things can definitely be done alone, although it is way more fun with a partner. twis.
i would definitely thumbs-up this as a gift idea for people who like puzzles. it’s out of print, as so many awesome things are, but should be easy to track down. go—find it! have some fun. it really makes waiting in line more fun for everyone.
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