‘Sam & Dave Dig a Hole’ and send young readers on a wild ride

Kids love to scratch in the dirt. Dig holes. Bury things. Unbury things. Best-selling picture book creators Mac Barnett and Jon Klassen feel certain of that.

Back in the day, Barnett and Klassen surely did, which partly fueled their collaboration on “Sam & Dave Dig a Hole,” due for release Tuesday. The two will visit Kansas City on Friday.

“Jon and I are both diggers,” says Barnett, 32, who wrote the story. “Everything I ever built as a kid always disappointed me. I was never disappointed with any of the holes I dug.”

They also were drawn to the prospect of portraying hole-digging in a book, moving geographically around the pages, especially down.

“We were thinking of vertical movement in general,” says Klassen, 32, the illustrator. “Down is interesting because there could be things underneath you don’t know about.”

That’s what Sam and Dave thought. While most young hole-diggers don’t get very far, Sam and Dave do. And once inside their fresh, giant hole, they seem to switch directions at exactly the wrong times, when a buried gem is just a shovelful of dirt away.

Kids love the gag, says Barnett, who earlier in the month made the rounds at elementary schools. Sam and Dave don’t know what they’re missing, but the audience does, thanks to Klassen’s illustrations.

“The kids are just screaming at Sam and Dave, ‘it’s right there, it’s right there!’” Barnett says. “Sam and Dave aren’t stupid. They just don’t have X-ray vision.”

Although the youngsters never hit pay dirt, such impressive tunneling might have been adventure enough for readers and for Sam, Dave and their dog, which at least finds a bone in the big hole. But Barnett and Klassen are way more adventurous than that.

They’re good friends and like-minded when it comes to children’s literature. Klassen is married and lives in Los Angeles. Barnett is single and lives in Berkeley, Calif. Earlier they collaborated on the award-winning picture book “Extra Yarn.”

As they hatched it during a diner session a few years back, the story doesn’t end when the boys stop digging. Instead, it enters a bit of a Twilight Zone.

Spoiler alert: After our heroes tire of digging, they don’t climb out of their hole, they fall through it, somehow landing in the spot where they started.

Or is it? There’s the house. Everything looks the same as it did at the beginning of the book — almost. Check out the weather vane and the cat’s collar. Are those pears on the apple tree? Sam and Dave seem none the wiser as they head inside.

“It’s noticing and not noticing, seeing and not seeing,” Barnett says.

Even if young readers don’t recognize the subtle changes immediately, the sudden ending of the story doesn’t seem right to them, Klassen says.

“It feels a little bit off, so they go looking for more, and they find it,” he says.

“It doesn’t look like a creepy story, but I think it is a creepy story,” Klassen says. “Sam and Dave are going inside the house, and we don’t know what’s inside.”

Could be a creepy place, or it could be the coolest place in the world.

“Mystery and ambiguity are some of the great pleasures of books,” Barnett says. “There’s a tendency to think that’s off-limits in books for kids, but I don’t buy that for a second.”

But about the hole-digging: Any concern that our modern screen-happy kids won’t relate? Do they still love scratching in the dirt?

No worries, say Barnett and Klassen. After a school book event a while back, they noticed two youngsters sitting at the roots of a big tree, mounding and channeling dirt with their hands.

“What is this?” they asked the kids. “What are you doing?”

The kids looked up: “We’re building a water slide park for ants.”

This story was originally published October 12, 2014 at 7:00 AM with the headline "‘Sam & Dave Dig a Hole’ and send young readers on a wild ride."