Nightmare on Eat Street -
Tales from the Leopard Eating House
Written & Illustrated by David Liew (2014)
It is rumoured among foodies that there is a unique eatery offering cuisine that is truly out of this world. They say that it’s somewhere in the Lesser Yiwill Road area, but all you find there is the unspeakable Leopard Eating House and its generally inedible menu.
But they’re not rumours. The Eat Street Dining Club does exist – and it does offer fare that defies the human palate. It has to – since its patrons are either undead, reanimated or generally supernatural.
When a new resident joins the group, her presence isn’t welcomed by everybody in the Club. The newcomer has a dark secret and it’s going to be revealed in an explosive confrontation...
As night fell on Halloween, the world stood helplessly by as horror erupted at the opening of the 2014 Singapore Writers' Festival...
Tired of being just the guy who draws funny pictures for other people's stories, Bluestone Arts founder David Liew inflicted Nightmare on Eat Street - Tales from the Leopard Eating House upon the defenseless reading public. His mind twisted by years of unfulfilled desire (or delusions) of being a writer, he wrote the book in a hybrid format - illustrated text punctuated with graphic novel panels.
It's a tale of zombies, ghoulies, animated skeletons, talking suits of armour, hypersenstive dragons and lycanthropes with identity crises. Add to this mix the meeting place of a secret dining establishment for unorthodox patrons and the odd child prodigy steampunk inventor renegade and things get a wee bit strange...
The jury is still out as to whether the horror is in the theme or the awful writing...
Nightmare on Eat Street is my first book. It's experimental in more ways than one. Besides making the move to visualizing my OWN stories, it's done in what children's author Emma Nicholson calls "hydrid format" - where it's part illustrated chapter book and part graphic novel.
Available from Bubbly Books.