Goblins come in all shapes and sizes. Most are small, grotesque creatures who love to torment unsuspecting humans. Others are simply dumb, lazy, loutish brats with unspeakable personal habits. But whatever the type, goblins are malevolent and cantankerous to humans -- even when they are on their best behaviour.
Up until now our scanty knowledge of goblins had been based on speculation, but we now know a great deal more, thanks to an important archaeological find by the eminent part-time goblinologist Brian Froud, who stumbled across forty-three notebooks crated by Dash, the Reynolds of goblin portraitists. These precious notebooks are necessarily sketchy, but years of painstaking reconstruction by Froud, backed up by years of dry research by his colleague, the noted academic Terry Jones, have produced what amounts to an illustrated Who's Who of the goblin world.
The gallery of slimy portraits includes such smelly denizens of the Labyrinth as Hallow goblins, who can spit half a mile and turn their grannies into sofas; the Klutton, which lays an egg three times its size; Zitzie, the "beautiful" goblin, the contents of whose handbag strike fear into all goblins; Stench, the great cook's assistant, who puts his whole heart into the cooking; and Foregoblins, who have the power to see into the future and must have been delighted about the publication of this book, which is at once a sumptuous and entertaining companion to the film Labyrinth, and a major contribution to goblinological research.