Stitch Head

Guy Bass's Stitch Head is a funny, spooky story for 8 year olds about a mad professor's very first creation, who's been forgotten for years.

What happens

Stitch Head is small (about the size of a medium-sized monkey) and made from leftover bits. His round bald head is covered in stitches and his eyes don't match. One is a little black bead. The other is big, bright and ice blue.

Long ago, he and the young professor promised to be friends forever. Then the professor grew up, got busy making monsters and forgot all about him.

So Stitch Head lives down in the dungeon of Castle Grotteskew and quietly keeps everyone safe. Every new creation wakes up monstrous. Stitch Head creeps out with a bag of homemade potions and calms them down before they can rampage into town. The other creations think he's a ghost!

Then a brand-new Creature swallows a bottle of Wolf-Away, stops trying to smash down the castle door and decides Stitch Head is its BESTEST friend. It has three arms, a memory that only goes back a few minutes and no name, so it starts trying some out (Gordon? Gravyboat? Gogglebox?). Stitch Head just wants to be left alone. The Creature isn't having it.

The Creature is the funniest thing in the book. It shouts every other word and loves everything it sees, from castles to crates of junk. Watching shy, gloomy Stitch Head get hauled into the light by it is lovely.

Meanwhile a shabby showman called Fulbert Freakfinder keeps knocking at the Great Door. He wants a better class of freak for his travelling carnival, and he's sure Stitch Head could be a star. Can you guess what a lonely, forgotten creation makes of that?

There are monsters galore, but the frights are mostly the silly sort and the creations are terribly polite. A little rhyme early on says a girl called Lucy went to the castle and died, which some readers might stop at. The sad bit is Stitch Head's own story. He sat waiting for his master in a locked room for forty years (that one might tug at the heartstrings a little).

If your reader likes a kind-hearted monster and a lot of daft jokes, they'll be rooting for him all the way.

What to read next

For another lonely hero who finds a monster for a friend, try The Unimaginary Friend. Nobody comes to Ben's birthday party, so he imagines his monster friend the Gorblimey so hard that the Gorblimey turns up for real.