I had an experience this weekend. It looked something like this:



and this:



and this:



and this:



This was not a store, by the way. This was a person's house.

In fact, these few photos utterly fail to capture the impact of this experience. This was not one room, or even a set of rooms, this was nearly every room in the house, floor-to-ceiling, lining door frames and window ledges, stacked neatly on shelves and piled onto beds, were rows upon rows upon rows of plushie monsters. Monsters. Of plush. I recognized most, but not all of them from cult classic sci-fi films to holiday specials to popular kid's cereal characters, but please picture (if you can) entering an entire three-story house covered floor-to-ceiling in stuffed animal monsters, including a home theater dedicated entirely to monster movies.


The upstairs home theater. I dubbed it "the safe room."

My son stopped dead in the doorway and wouldn't budge. My husband refused to go near the wall of mini-to-giant-sized Furbies. My daughter gleefully explored the walls looking for favorites like the Abominable Snowman and Fizzgig and Stellaluna. Me? I took pictures. I had the vague feeling that I'd either stepped into the house described in READY PLAYER ONE with the claustrophobia of DIRTY LITTLE SECRETS meets what it must have been like for Marcus in PAPER TOWNS in his parents' house filled with black Santas. Basically, it was surreal--like walking into a character's house, not something that belonged in real life, although that is what our books are based on. So: life imitating life imitating life. With Furbies.

Ever feel like that? (With or without the Furbies.) Actually, I'm pretty sure this is what my madness looks like from the outside. It's a humbling (and bizarrely fascinating) perspective. What do you think?