Vera, Scarper and Castro sat on someones Dad
''The weather clock said,
"Knife O'Clock",
so I chained Dad up in the shed.''
— Introduction of The Motherless Oven
The Motherless Oven is a 2014 dark fantasy graphic novel created by Rob Davis. It was followed by The Can Opener's Daughter in 2016 and The Book of Forks in 2019.
The world of these books is surreal and imaginative: children design and make their own parents, the sky rains knives and household appliances are seen as Gods.
The first book in the trilogy centres on Scarper Lee, a normal teenager who is two weeks away from his 'Death Day' and is spending his last days on earth simply going to school and hanging around with his friends. All this changes when he meets Vera Pike, a strange and sly girl with a mysterious past, and Castro, a boy with an odd mechanical implant who likes to dissect egg timers. Pike and Castro encourage Scarper to run away with them in order to escape his Death Day and find the mysterious Motherless Oven, where it is believed all children make their parents.
The Can Opener's Daughter, continued the story of The Motherless Oven while also exploring Pike's backstory and her relationship with her overbearing mother.
The Motherless Oven series provides examples of the following tropes:
- Alas, Poor Villain: Vera's mother, the fake Weather Clock, is murdered in the street by an angry mob of people, who each get a turn stabbing her with a knife. Vera's father begs his daughter to leave him with her mother's body, so he can comfort her to the end.
- Stour Provost, the leader of Bear Park's police force, was hardly a sympathetic character, yet her death is far from merciful. She is handcuffed to a statue and left to be torn apart by the knife rain.
- Artificial Family Member: All parents were created by their children in the Motherless Oven. Scarper's mum is a Bakelite hairdryer, whereas Castro's mum is a flock of budgies (who all seem to talk in her voice). Orson's father is depicted on the page image, resembling a gigantic sphere with a face and legs. His mother on the other hand, appears much more animalistic in comparison.
- The titular Motherless Oven is shown in more detail in the second book. Each child is given a mixture of materials to work from and are only inhibited by their imagination in what they can create.
- Bittersweet Ending: The Book of Forks concludes with Castro, who is incredibly weak and seems near death, leaving behind Scarper and Pike to stop the knife storm coming from Grave Acre. Scarper and Pike will likely never see him again. However, Castro leaves behind his "Book of Forks", which he hopes will finally bring peace (or an end) to the Death States once everyone reads it and understands the truth behind everything.
- Boarding School of Horrors: The second book explores Vera's childhood and how she was forcibly enrolled in St. Sylvia's School of Bleak Prospects and Suicide. It's just as lovely as it sounds.
- Every year the girls are traditionally meant to stone a bird to death. They also have to keep and update Suicide Graphs to show when they will die. Not updating your graph or doing it wrong is a death sentence...literally.
- Cliffhanger: See Downer Ending.
- Crapsack World: Where to begin? If you live in Bear Park, committing any crime or misdeed will get you locked inside a People Jar for eternity, knives can rain from the sky at any time, and everyone is told exactly when they are going to die (their Death Day). Bear Park is also overrun with gangs that have nice names like "Rita and the Finger Eaters".
- Grave Acre, Pike's original home, is just as bad. Their society also has an unhealthy obsession with death, and anyone who commits an infraction, however minor, is forced to commit suicide.
- It is revealed in The Book of Forks that Bear Park and Grave Acre are "Death States", of which there are many others that each have their own way of managing death. For example, in Want Borough, everyone slowly starves to death and in Quietus the inhabitants can randomly explode.
- Death from Above: Orson the Moron's mother is killed by a knife that falls from the sky. See Weird Weather.
- The Determinator: The police, led by Stour Provost, never stop hunting their target. Although they are old and slow moving, they will eventually catch up to their victims sooner or later, as they never seem to need rest.
- Downer Ending: The endings of both The Motherless Oven and The Can Opener's Daughter leave the characters in less than desirable positions. At the end of the first book, Scarper is captured by the police at the last second after trying to make it to safety, and the second book ends with a gravely hurt Castro being tended to by Scarper and Pike.
- Evil Matriarch: See One Bad Mother.
- Evil Old Folks: All the older people in Bear Park use and abuse their positions of authority. The police force is filled with old people who take sadistic pleasure in catching miscreants for even very minor crimes and locking them away until their Death Day. It is revealed that the members of the police force are all escapees from Grave Acre who tried to avoid their own deaths, making them very hypocritical figures.
- Last-Name Basis: Vera Pike is mostly referred to as just "Pike". Only her mother and father call her Vera.
- One Bad Mother: Vera Pike's mother. She ignores and bullies her child, mainly out of her own insecurities and desire for control, and is a tyrant over the weather and people of Bear Park.
- Our Gods Are Different: Household appliances are called Gods, but are not worshipped as such. Rather they are used as tools for humans and sing cryptic songs which may or may not be prophetic. When Castro dissects one, it appears to have intestines despite being an egg timer God.
- The second book explores how the Weather Clock is viewed as a God and the Prime Minister of both Grave Acre and Bear Park.
- People Jars: People who've committed crimes are preserved in jars with tubing and strange liquid until they reach their Death Day, which could be either the next week or not for another few decades. Vera and Castro break Scarper out of a jar in the second book.
- Raised by Robots: Some of the parents seem quite robotic in design, although so far it has not been revealed how human the parents actually are. However, it is shown that parents can malfunction and are abandoned in scrapyards when they no longer have a use.
- Ridiculously Human Robots: All the parents have personalities. Scarper's mum is afraid of the knife storms for example, and it is suggested that his dad ran away because he could not cope with the thought of his son dying. The parents can also drink and smoke.
- Screw Destiny: Although society tells Scarper that he will die on his Death Day and cannot escape this fate, Vera and Castro promise Scarper that they will help him escape this destiny, no matter what.
- Spikes of Villainy: Vera's mother is covered in sharp spikes.
- Surreal Horror: The books are full of bizarre, sometimes nightmarish imagery, such as the graveyard of mothers and Orson's mother. Vera Pike's mother is also nicely creepy and inhuman.
- Weird Weather: An understatement really. Knives fall from the sky at regular intervals, the wind laughs and Summer is controlled by a machine with floating mines that emanate heat. It is revealed that the knife storms are controlled by the Weather Clock of Grave Acre.
- In the time span between the second and third books, Grave Acre has declared war on Bear Park and are creating knife storms more regularly to kill the people below and the fake Weather Clock, Vera's mother.
