Reviews and Comments

What is a post box topper? Here, it’s a device for attracting space aliens, a teenager’s unrequited love, a mysterious nemesis, and the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” from village residents, business owners, the local mayor, the local reverend. And making everyone in the story overreact to everything.

A group of unique and quirky knitters in the appropriately-named village of Creapy Bottom (yes, the village name gets explained later) take on the challenge of designing and knitting a custom post box topper. Each month. For a year. Add the aforesaid nemesis and a shady and suspect local newspaper reporter. And the story unfolds with one hilarious overreaction after another, overreactions on top of overreactions, forever and ever, amen, (not quoting the town reverend, Reverend Prendergast).

And don’t forget repeated instances of topper vandalism. The mysterious nemesis responds to each topper with written complaint letters to the local constabulary, to their local town council, to their mayor, to the member of Parliament that represents them. (Who is the nemesis? Not telling! Read the book to find out.)

ANYWAY, reading this made me chuckle, giggle and laugh. Part of what makes it so funny is a bit of a “play on manners” – the constant attempt by characters to play it straight, keep a stiff upper lip, preserve the traditional British reserve, maintain the proprieties – while overreacting to everything. And coming off, themselves, as rather silly.

In fact, much of the hilarity ensues not from the various events that happen, but in how the characters overreact. Even to small events.

I had read a short story by Donald E. Westlake, “Now What?” about a thief simply trying to smuggle stolen jewelry across Manhattan into Brooklyn, and the increasingly bizarre happenings that he runs into along the way. The Post Box Toppers Chronicles echoes that. Although the Chronicles includes no thieves, there’s quite an uproar when someone in town sees a UFO hovering over the topper, with beams of light, apparently taking part of the topper.

Everything turns out to have a perfectly-reasonable explanation by the end. For me, that only reinforced how fundamentally funny everyone in the story was.

I think the weakest part of the story is the group chairperson’s constant fear that the group will throw her out at the end of her term. (She tends to take failures personally and assumes that the group blames her for every failure.) By the first 2-3 parts, it was completely clear (to me) that no one else in the group wanted to run the group. They complained or disagreed about some things, but that was it. Since the end of the book resolves around that question, the story tries to keep that tension throughout, but it was no surprise to me. But it’s still a nice, warm-fuzzy ending.