I feel like the cover of this book is the biggest lie it tells, and this is a book in which toys come to life and start attacking kids with actual lasers.
The character on the front is clearly meant to be none other than Charles Lee Ray, aka Chucky the doll who kills people for increasingly opaque reasons as the series goes on.
However, this character is meant to be Hurley the Hobo, a tiny figure for a model train set, who is, as his name would indicate, a hobo.
Why does this hobo look like Chucky? I guess because that indicates scariness waits within the pages.
But this isn’t really the first face I think of when I think of “crazed hobo,” the chubby, but also evil, face of a child.
By the way, we’re talking about a hobo, here, not a “person experiencing homelessness.” This is a fictional character with a bindle, not a dude living in his car because he lost his job last week. Hurley never had a job. He’s a figure for a model town. Who, also, is insane and is able to imbue other toys with sentience. Really, his having a home is far from the most important thing about him.
Is it super progressive or regressive to have a hobo in your model train town? On one hand, he’s basically a decoration, but on the other hand, literally every figure in the town is a decoration. It’s not like the guy with the top hat and monocle is highly respected by a child with a model train while Hurley the Hobo exists to be pointed and laughed at.