Unlike Harold and his famous purple crayon, 15-year-old Baylor Jenkins needed help from a magical spellbook to bring her scribbles to life. 

Being a morose kid, Baylor wasn’t drawing flowers, rainbows, kittens or anime girls in cute outfits. Instead, she uncapped her black Sharpie and drew the kind of things you’d expect to find scrawled in the margins of a metalhead’s high school math textbook—mostly monsters with gaping mouths, sharp teeth and rippling gray eyes.

Baylor used her grimoire to help her write a hex that would bring her doodle monsters to life. “Rules be damned,” she wrote, “give these creatures life. Let this curse take hold and cure my strife.” Admittedly, the spell was kind of dumb, but give credit to author Heather Ann Larson for capturing the awkwardness of bad teenage poetry. 

Surprisingly, Baylor’s malefice was successful, and the monsters in her sketchbook sprang to life. Before the night was over, one of her parents was eaten (!!) and her little sister Ruby slipped into a catatonic state that would last for the next 15 years. 

Now the crudely drawn things were back. In fact, they never really went away. Even Baylor’s coworkers could tell something was haunting her. “There was something in the air,” thought Bill, her best friend and colleague, “a wavy aura surrounding her that was dark, foreboding and gave off the stench of a rotting corpse.” Peripherally, he caught a glimpse of movement in Baylor’s office. It almost looked like a kid had taken a Sharpie to her wall.

Pretty soon, Baylor was having explicit nightmares. The abominations even dragged Ruby (now 20 years old) into their sketchpad domain. It was all too much for her to handle. How the hell could she defeat a drawing, she wondered. Baylor knew she couldn’t do it alone. 

Thankfully, her coworker and a concerned police detective rushed to her rescue. Unbeknownst to her, they both had preternatural superpowers. Bill had synesthesia, an acute perceptual intuition, and, like a dowsing rod, Detective Elliot Wolfe had the ability to find hidden things. 

Which leads me to the one major criticism I have of Crudely Drawn. According to the author, Baylor had a “small amount of power.” In addition, her coworker had superpowers, the police detective also had superpowers and her sister was a telepath. Sheesh! It’s just too much. I’m sure I’ve got powers. And I bet you do too. Everybody’s got superpowers!

But I quibble. Despite some missteps, Larson has written an entertaining and creepy little story. It’s obvious to me that she’s at the beginning of her writerly journey. Give her some time. I predict good things from her in the future. 

[ Crudely Drawn / By Heather Ann Larson / First Printing / August 2026 / ISBN: 9798187276158 ]