Rhinoceroses in The Living Room

By Sam Allis

Peter and Judy find a board game under a tree one afternoon while their parents are out and take it home to play. When they roll the dice, strange events ensue: rhinoceroses stampede into the living room, monkeys trash the kitchen, an 8-ft. snake luxuriates on the living-room mantel. A monsoon erupts, and volcanic lava fills the house, until, on the brink of disaster, Peter and Judy manage to end the game before their parents come home. The house instantly returns to normal. But then neighboring children take the game to their own house to play, unaware of the dangers lurking within it.

This is the unsettling world of Chris Van Allsburg. The children's illustrator and author creates books that abound in dramatic perspectives, teasing narratives and haunting, incongruous images. Other authors may try to improve children with edifying themes or thrill them with shocks; Van Allsburg, a small, shy man of 40, simply taps into their vast reservoir of mystery. "To puzzle children is more interesting to me than to educate or frighten them," he says. "I like to plant a seed that will start a mental process, rather than present my own."

It is the strangeness of those processes that seems distinctively his own. In The Mysteries of Harris Burdick (1984), a volume of page-size charcoal drawings accompanied by short captions, a suburban house blasts off into the night sky. Beneath it are the words "The house on Maple Street. It was a perfect lift-off." Van Allsburg has a gift for adopting unusual vantage points. After spotting two ants in his kitchen one day, he dreamed up Two Bad Ants (1988), in which the adventures of a pair of the insects -- being buffeted inside a garbage disposal and nearly getting cooked in a toaster -- are seen from the angle of the creatures themselves. "If I were an ant looking out from an electrical socket," Van Allsburg explains, "the long slits in which the light poured in would look like 15-ft. doorways hung in space." And so they do.

Van Allsburg's vision may be bizarre, but it strikes a broadly responsive chord. Jumanji (1981), his board-game fantasy, won the Caldecott Medal, the industry's most prestigious award for illustrated children's books. The Polar Express, also a Caldecott winner, has appeared on best-seller lists in three Christmas seasons since its release in 1985. In this lovely tale, a boy wakes on Christmas Eve to find a train wreathed in steam below his bedroom window, waiting to take him to the North Pole and a meeting with Santa Claus. In all, the nine books Van Allsburg has published over the past decade have sold almost 2 million copies.

Yet nothing he has done approaches the commercial potential -- or, for the publishers, the commercial risk -- of his latest book, a collaboration with novelist Mark Helprin on a retelling of the Swan Lake legend (Houghton Mifflin; $19.95). He and Helprin received an unprecedented $801,000 advance, and the first printing is 275,000 copies, at least ten times the normal first run for an illustrated children's book. Swan Lake's publication, quite simply, is the biggest gamble in the history of children's books.

It also marks the culmination of a career that never pointed toward children's books in the first place. Van Allsburg, the son of a Grand Rapids dairy owner, set out to be a sculptor after studying at the University of Michigan and the Rhode Island School of Design. But he also sketched continually, and his wife Lisa, then an art teacher, showed some of his drawings to children's book editors. "Everybody else called them odd," he recalls. "I didn't." The editors liked the oddness. In 1979 Van Allsburg made his debut with The Garden of Abdul Gasazi, in which a boy and a dog stumble onto the house of a magician who wears a fez and blows perfect smoke rings. Typically, the story ends in ambiguity: the reader never knows for sure whether the magician turns Fritz, the signature bull terrier that has appeared in all of Van Allsburg's subsequent books, into a duck.

The Van Allsburgs, who have no children, now live in Providence, where he teaches illustration at the Rhode Island School of Design. He says his academic immersion in the subject had nothing to do with it, but the 13 pictures he produced for Swan Lake are stylistically among the most orthodox of his career. They could trace their lineage to the Scribner's children's classics of half a century ago, when the pictures of nonpareils like N.C. Wyeth and Maxfield Parrish graced the tissue-covered plates. Still, Van Allsburg retains his special dream aura in the brooding shadows in which the swans float, in the surprising sight of pigs being led through the door of a formal bedroom, in the everyday surrealism of a man absorbed in reading while standing on a horse's back. As Van Allsburg puts it, in contrast to the foursquare rightness of traditional illustration, "I like the sense of 'What's wrong with this picture?' "