Started off Holes, little weird the “also by Louis Sachar” bits don’t even mention the Wayside School books, but they rounded up enough other material to promo anyway.
So far you can kind of see how he’s deploying the same skill/style, rendering Camp Green Lake as kind of fantastically absurd until you go line by line and go “actually yeah, it is in fact feasible that a real state of Texas juvenile prison camp and one inmate’s encounter with it would in fact be exactly that way”.
Just got to the introduction of “Mr. Sir”, and it’s impressive how he does build him up in line with the standard stereotype of the cowboy-hat Texas jailer but then immediately humanizes him with the smoking-replacement sunflower seeds just enough that it doesn’t even soften him so much as rein him in from going overboard \u2013 that this guy may be kind of a hardass as you would expect the position selects for but he’s not really that as a mythological figure \u2013 even after it was kind of building up the epicness of it all, drawing on ambient cultural prison mythology. He is a jailer but not The Jailer, he’s a public employee who presumably goes home and has to pick a roofer to redo his shingles.
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