Storybook Favorites: One Cat and Two Afterlives

Tale of the Traveling Cat

 The Tale of the Traveling Cat creates the character Duke, an adventurous cat who invented time travel glasses and sends himself through time to visit multiple different times. As he travels through time, he ends up altering the different stories he comes across.

The introduction is not what I expected, but does a good job of explaining the concept behind the storybook, of Duke's traveling through time with his glasses, while heavily hinting at the cat-related nature of all the stories. Duke is a cat, and the introduction told from his perspective states multiple times that all of the people he knows are also cats. Therefore, when we get to all of Duke's adventures revolve around historical and mythological cats, it comes as no surprise. These adventures range from drastic changes to the story, such as in the story of Baster and Apep where Duke replaces Bastet and Bastet replaces Ra, resulting in a potential different outcome when Duke vanishes mid-battle with Apep, to minimal changes, such as in the story of Muezza where Duke simply takes the place of Muezza without changing the events of the story itself.

Hell on Earth

Hell on Earth's introduction gives a different take on Dante's Inferno, implying that instead of being a physical place, Hell is the state of mind that results from the consequences of immoral actions in the real world. From there, the author takes on the role of Virgil, telling the readers that they will experience 'hell' themselves through the three different pieces within the storybook. The author states that the reader will become each of the people in those pieces, and experience the hell that is described in those stories.

Each story is told in the first person, to give the reader the experience that this is 'them'. While the intent is clear, the first person narrator has their own character, shown at the end of each piece when they converse with Virgil. The immersion as a reader to put myself into the role of these characters breaks when a character within the story is written to have literally been put into those roles instead.

The Underworld Examiner

The Underworld Examiner has some similarities to Hell on Earth at first glance, but very quickly distinguishes itself. The narrator is Hermes, who takes on a similar role as Virgil in showing the reader the stories at hand (something also shared by the Tale of the Traveling Cat), and Hermes mirrors Virgil in warning the reader of the dark tone that some of the tales might take. However, instead of trying to put the reader into the role of people who have committed sin, Hermes instead simply tells the reader of the souls he has taken to Charon, the ferryman of souls to the underworld.

"Charon carries souls across the River Styx" by Alexander Dmitrievich Litovchenko.

The title is very forward about what the tales will be: examinations of different souls who died and would have gone to the Underworld. The different stories are narrated by Hermes, adding a different perspective and narration to the tales but otherwise leaving them unchanged. This works well with the presentation of Hermes as the narrator; since Hermes only takes the souls to Charon after their death, he would not be changing or interfering with the events at all, and these tales are only him telling the events to the reader.