You might want to be careful handling local author John Perry’s first children’s book. And if you’re not sure why, you probably need look no further than the glowering eyes on its bright red cover, peeking up over yellow cautionary tape that proclaims “The Book That Eats People” (Tricycle Press).

“As a dad, I can’t imagine walking into a bookstore and seeing that title and not picking it up just to see what it was,” said Perry, a resident of Ann Arbor for the last 15 years, who admits that his 4- and 7-year-old daughters had pretty much exhausted his appreciation of “fairy stories, stories with morals and stories that went to the beach.”

This book has none of that; the closest it comes to moralizing is when the marauding literary monster, during a stint of hard time for snacking on three neighborhood kids, also polishes off a cellmate “who deserved it.” It spends much of his time in predictable places — school, library, nightstand — with rather tragic results in each (the library’s really going to miss that night security guard) before the well-intentioned folks at the zoo decide it’s an incorrigible beast and… well, I won’t tell you what happens next. But make sure you wash any trace of peanut butter or cookies from your hands before you pick it up.

Before he was a stay-at-home-dad spending an overabundance of time in imaginary worlds populated by gnomes and sprites, Perry spent 10 years at an ad agency and then worked in advertising media sales at CBS Detroit and Clear Channel Ann Arbor. He and his wife decided a couple of years ago that they didn’t want to “put the kids in the car at 6 a.m. to pick them up at 6 p.m. to put them to bed,” so he quit the office life. But this is a guy who gives the impression that he never runs out of ideas, and he was busily sketching out the characters and plot for a television show when the seed for this book arrived in a dream.

“It’s funny,” mused Perry, “because advertising is like short-form storytelling. And if you do it really well, then you can speak to the real inner heart of a person, a real emotional need that the person has fulfilled.” So it seemed like a reasonable leap to leave the sales slant behind and just do the wordcraft, figuring he had hold of a fun idea and that “if I wrote it well enough, people would read it.”

Maybe — but before that, there’s the small matter of getting it published. “You know, there aren’t really a lot of publishers looking for unsolicited manuscripts from unagented people,” said Perry, delivering his entry for the Understatement of the Year contest in an excellent deadpan. 

He rummaged around online and found about 10 firms that looked hopeful. The rejections came first, within a few months, then a couple of nice notes that did not include the word “congratulations,” then a letter from a publisher expressing interest in his other stuff (but not the work at hand). 

Tricycle Press picked it up eight months and one revision into the waiting game, and Perry still marvels at his good fortune. “I think you can get a different story from practically anybody than ‘I turned in my first manuscript unsolicited and now it’s getting published.’”

It was his editor at the Press who chose the illustrator — a gentleman whose name, Mark Fearing, suggests he might have been born for the job. As a character, Fearing renders the book as equal parts voraciously carnivorous and lovably crabby, and the humans’ wide eyes and red noses make their cartoon faces vividly expressive. Several pages use yellowed text as a backdrop to the action, so you’re welcome to pepper your return trips through the story with snippets about southern colonial industry and central Asian snakes.

Those return trips are important to Perry. “One of the things I like about the illustrations is that I hope, I’ve always hoped, that it was something a ten-year-old kid could look at and think, ‘What was this guy really getting at?’” Which begs the question: what was this guy really getting at? The grin that accompanied Perry's reply was audible through the phone. “I just wanted to make people laugh and tell a story.”

The Book That Eats People hits the shelves on Tuesday. Perry will read from the book at the Kerrytown BookFest on Sept. 13, at 1 p.m. in the children's tent.

Leah DuMouchel is a free-lance writer who covers books for AnnArbor.com.