Ransom Riggs Has a Hollow City for You

The bestselling author Ransom Riggs makes a book-tour stop at Austin's favorite bibliotheque this night, to present his follow-up to the engagingly macabre Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children.

When we met with the affable ectomorph at Thunderbird Coffee on Manor last week, he had this to say about –

OK, no, that's a lie.

Truth be told, our efforts to contact the elusive Mr. Riggs have proven futile and confounding.

1. The phone number we were given for an interview led to an audio recording from one of those odd number stations (as referenced so effectively in Jean Cocteau's Orpheus (1950)). A minute's listening served only to produce a strange burning sensation throughout the fungiform contortions of our inner ear.

2. The meticulously arranged meet-up at Thunderbird Coffee never took place, for when we arrived at the time confirmed by the author's publicist, the ever-bustling establishment was empty, devoid of Eastside slackers and creative fomenters, the usual contingent of model-pretty baristas absent from their posts, and the only inhabitants a pair of conjoined twins ~ two young women, gone singular from approximately the seventh rib down, their pale faces like the faces of bored harpies ~ who refused to serve us anything but espresso spiked with kummel.

3. We thought we saw Riggs decked out in a stylish Quirk Books hoodie and a pair of pencil-leg Gabriel Hounds, taking a picture of Daniel Johnston's Space Frog graffito on the UT campus this morning; but by the time we'd turned the car around without compromising the shambling flesh of weed-saturated undergrads … the fellow had vanished. Utterly.

So we'll be standing in line with the rest of y'all at BookPeople this evening, having purchased a fine copy of Hollow City for inscribing by the hand of what we can only hope is the author himself and not some clever, casually dressed simulacrum with sleep-deprived eyes.