The Sturges family arrived in the New World not fifty years after the trolls, settling first in Boston and Maine. The American Sturgeses, however, found themselves without reason to fight the peaceful Euro-American trolls, and over time their warrior lifestyle was overtaken by pursuits far more useful for a developing nation: the art of tannery, the brewing of ale, the growing of soybeans, and, much later, the perfection of the calculator pocket.

Three hundred and fifty years passed with little more kerfuffle than the occasional irate cat owner. Then something happened that changed the course of troll/human history forever. In 1967, the London Bridge, which ran across the River Thames and was the busiest hub of traffic in that great city, was disassembled and shipped in its entirety over five thousand miles away to Lake Havasu City, Arizona. Absurd though this may seem, it is true: a rich engineer purchased the London Bridge as a tourist attraction to bring people to his out-of-the-way real estate development.

The Arizona reconstruction took over three years to complete, but it took only an hour for the trolls who’d stowed away inside the bridge segments to escape. Upon landing in Arizona, the inhabitants of London Bridge tore apart their crates and fled into the night. By January of 1968, they had crossed the California border and set about doing what Old World trolls did best: eating children. This treacherous tribe, made up of all the worst elements of every troll family in Europe, was collectively known as the Gumm-Gumms.

(“‘Gumm-Gumms’?” Tub repeated. “That’s pretty much the least scary name I’ve ever heard.” “Imagine what we think of ‘Dershowitz,’” Blinky replied. This comment I didn’t bother to translate.)

The Gumm-Gumms had terrorized the Eurasian continent for well over a thousand years. They were first mentioned in a parchment addressed to King Constantine II circa 920 A.D., wherein they were described as “horrid and of putrid breath and hoggish in their appetites.” In the 1100s the Gumm-Gumms descended from the Scottish Highlands, and just one hundred years later were known to have taken possession of every single bridge in Londinium under the barbaric command of their ageless leader, Gunmar the Black. It is believed that Gunmar chose to center his clan in San Bernardino specifically to spite the self-satisfied pacifists who populated the local underworld.

Whatever the reason, he and his minions wasted no time stealing children. One per month for the first three months. Then one per week. By the time 1969 began, several children were disappearing every week in San Bernardino, each one of them dragged screaming to a hidden underground labyrinth and caged for weeks before being grilled over an open flame and eaten.