The imaginary critic had never been teased or entertained in his life because his father had banned him from participating, claiming it was a “form of begging.” To fit in with the spirit of his time, he asked his 8-year-old nephew Graham to review some of his latest costumes for this year’s horror festival. Here you go, Graham! Hello, I’m Graham and Graham. I am eight and a half years old this year. Uncle critic asked me to write about clothes, saying that if I didn’t, he wouldn’t give me any Christmas trailers, so I came. I’m going to tease or entertain vampires this year. If a werewolf bites a vampire on the full moon, he becomes a vampire and can fly. That’s what I do.
I’m in the middle of the sky. I would have teeth and fur, and then mumble, chase everyone. Gregory Simms said that vampire wolves don’t exist, but I don’t believe what he said because he said he saw a baby come out of his sister, but I don’t think her mouth is big enough to eat a whole, so he’s a liar. When I was a liar. Vampire, I’ll bite Gregory Simms, he’ll fall and die. Many people in our class go out wearing accordions. They have buttons, make noise and so on. I don’t like accordions because they make terrible noises that sound like the pigeons that Malcolm Beswick’s father ran over, not dead, but Malcolm Beswick isn’t dead. Dad took a shovel out of the back of the car and hit it. It stopped making noise. I saw its brain. That’s why I don’t want to dress up as an accordion. It sounds like death. A boy in our class is going out for Halloween as a pea salesman. He will wear green clothes and have a large metal tray full of farmers. I told him that the pea salesman wasn’t even real, but he said his mother said that when she was a girl, they had a pea salesman, but I don’t think she wanted to buy real beans. She may have found the peas on the floor because his family was so poor that they couldn’t afford to pay. A wasteful person. This is a stupid dress. I hate it.
Another popular costume this year is Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman. I think this is the scariest costume of all because Milton Friedman’s wrinkled face and bald head remind me of the unstoppable march of time that will carry us all down the path of history towards the unexplained infinite blackness of death. Also I find Friedman’s economic policies to be highly flawed but Julie Blackbury says she is dressing up as Friedman because his policies were influential and beneficial. I told Julie Blackbury that tax lowering as a tool of stimulating economic growth is empirically proven to be less effective than increased government spending but she said that the Friedman-inspired Reaganomics of the 80s ultimately recovered the US from stagflation but I said that the country would have recovered anyway without Friedman’s statist and totalitarian views and that the 2007-8 economic crisis was a direct result of Friedman’s policies and then I put a worm in her hair and she ran away.
Graham’s regular entertainment column will be appearing in Now Toronto Magazine from November 3rd. The Imaginary Reviewer had to fix a lot of the spelling in this review, and so Graham will be getting a Christmas present as promised, but it will be rubbish.
