There’s No Place Like Gnome

How the Ascension, sequels, and belief matter.

There’s no place like Gnome.

This, according to the wisdom of my 7 and 10 year old neighbors who hung up a small flag that proudly conveys this message as it overlooks their rock garden.

It’s quite a turn of events from what kids might have believed 100 years ago. Case in point, in the early 1900s, a popular author had released a series of children’s books, and in one of them, a girl ventures to save her friends from the evil Gnome King who had begun turning everyone and everything to stone. She sees a mysterious vision of someone summoning her to follow, and the girl discovers her friends need her help because they too have been turned into stone.

Along the way, she makes new friends who become a part of the fellowship of the rescue: a pumpkin headed figure named Jack, a talking chicken named Belina, a wind-up robot named Tick Tock, and a moose head that is magically enlivened with special pixie dust. They attach him to a bed with palm fronds on the sides, and magically the whole contraption becomes enlivened so that the moose now has wings and a body that they can sit on, as he flies them over the Deadly Desert. Of course, that’s not the only danger they experience, as they also have to escape the Gnome King’s minions, like the headless woman and the wheelers, all of whom have dreadfully haunting laughs.

If this sounds more like a fantasy horror than a children’s bedtime adventure…