Pinkwater's books tend to be highly imaginative, and the adventures his protagonists have are frequently bizarre, but he seems to have taken weirdness to a higher level in Slaves of Spiegel than in most of his other works.

In books such as The Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death (1982; see separate entry, Vol 9), events and characters can be very bizarre, but they usually have traditional narrative structures and plots that have an orderly chronological sequence of events. Both novels succeed, in part, because their plots take a normal youngster and introduce him into increasingly bizarre situations until it seems only natural that he has ended up in a world very different from his own.

Alan Mendelsohn, the Boy from Mars (1979; see separate entry, Vol 9), also uses this technique of progression from relative normalcy to utter strangeness. The book begins in a boring junior high school...