The Transferrable Seed of Paranoia

         In the book "Miss Peregrine's Home For Peculiar Children" by Ransom Riggs, Jacob finds himself amidst a confusing, somewhat unasked for adventure.
          Ever since Jacob was a child, his grandfather, Abe, has been telling him stories. "He always obliged, telling them like secrets that could only be entrusted in me." Abe's stories consisted of monsters, wars, riding on horseback, circuses, and most of all, peculiar children. Abe had escaped Poland from the Germans in World War II. When Jacob was younger, he had asked Abe why he had abandoned everything to escape. Abe always replied: "because the monsters were after me." The so-called monsters were "awful hunched-over ones with rotting skin and black eyes,". As Jacob said, "It wasn't long before I had trouble falling asleep." From there, Abe was sent to an orphanage with extremely "interesting" inhabitants. He described it as "an enchanted place, designed to keep kids safe from monsters, on an island where the sun shined every day and nobody every got sick or died. Everyone lived together in a big house that was protected by a wise old bird." He also talked about his fellow orphans. One was invisible, there was a girl who could fly, a boy who had bees living inside him,a brother and sister who could lift boulders over their heads, and a boy with a second mouth on the back of his head. Jacob became fascinated with these stories, as I'm sure any young child would at hearing of such a magical place. At such an early age, Jacob believed him one hundred percent. Abe planted a seed inside Jacob's head that had already been blooming in his own since he was a child.
          Jacob believed for awhile, until it started to cause him problems. One day in second grade, Robbie Jensen pantsed him at lunch in front of a table of girls and announced that he believed in fairies.  After that, Jacob declared that he no longer believed in the stories, the price was too much to pay, and he was getting too old. When he told hid grandfather this, Abe simply replied, "Okay". As Jacob got older, he talked to his father about the stories that Abe had told him. According to Jacob's father, the stories his grandfather had told him weren't lies, but exaggerated versions of the truth. "Grandpa Portman's childhood wasn't a fairytale at all. It was a horror story." Abe was sent on a one-way ticket into the arms of strangers, never to see his soon-to-be dead family ever again; "killed by the monsters he so narrowly escaped." As Jacob's father said, "these weren't the kind of monsters that had tentacles and rotting skin, the kind a seven-year-old might be able to wrap his mind around---they were monsters with human faces, in crisp uniforms, marching in lockstep, so banal you don't recognize them for what they are until it's too late."And so the seed of paranoia and dementia was forcefully planted inside of young Abe's head.
          As Grandpa Portman got older, he started to become slightly senile. Every now and then he would completely freak out, call one of the family members (typically Jacob) and yell that the monsters were coming to get him. He even had a stock of weaponry in which he would defend himself with. They eventually had to take the key to that safe away because they didn't want to risk harming others. On the day of Abe's death, he called Jacob, having a typical episode in which he said the monsters were there, and they were coming to get him, "if he could only find that goddamn key!". He was so incredibly scared of the monsters that had been haunting him all of his life.
          After Jacob left his job to come check on his Grandpa, he goes to his house and sees he is nowhere to be found. Nervously, he goes into the woods by his grandfathers house, with his friend behind him. Eventually, he comes across a scratched and bloody Abe lying on the ground. He had clearly been deeply injured. Jacob looks around to see what had done such an awful thing to his grandfather: "There was something in the woods, all right--- I could feel it.... I knew just when to raise my flashlight and just where to aim it, and for an instant in that narrow cur of light I saw a face that seemed to have been transplanted directly from the nightmares of my childhood. It stared back with eyes that swam in dark liquid, furrowed trenches of carbon-black flesh loose on its hunched frame, its mouth hinged open grotesquely so that a mass of long eel-like tongues could wriggle out." This part of the story really stuck out to me (apart from creeping me out!). Here Abe is lying down on the ground at his death bed, the epitome of all of the fantastical stories and imaginary creatures that had lead Jacob's life for so long, and what does he see standing near the scene? The very monster that had been haunting Grandpa Portman all of his life.
          Whether or not the monster was real, it triggered a thought for me. If the monster hadn't been real, then that means that Jacob must have been imagining it. His grandfathers stories had impacted his thoughts so much that they come to life. Soon after this tragic episode, Jacob tries to tell people about the monster that had supposedly killed his grandfather. His parents eventually get him a psychiatrist, and Jacob is supplied with numerous issues regarding this monster that Abe had been dreading all his life. When reading about the chain of events that impede's Jacob, I tried to think back to the cause. All of this had started with Abe's stories. These clearly extremely emotion-racking events that maimed Abe's psyche, Abe chose to share with Jacob. He took his own personal problems and embedded them into Jacob's mind. Generally people need to share such tragic experiences with someone, to prevent it from causing further damage. Although he lightened up the story, these monsters will probably have a role in Jacob's life for a long time. Was it really right for him to chose to tell it to a young child? To take a seed from his already blooming emotional instability and place it in Jacob's mind to further grow and develop?