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My family has a few mock adages. One of them is, “Trolls must be stopped!”

The declaration was made several years ago by my aunt, a third-grade teacher who was exasperated with a student’s constant need to turn every writing prompt into a story about troll dolls—the kind with gravity-defying felt hair of all the colors of the rainbow and a seemingly infinite variety of costumes.

My aunt said goodbye to the trolls when the student moved on to fourth grade, but trolls weren’t done with her. This past summer, my mom bought my aunt a copy of Tove Jansson’s Who Will Comfort Toffle?—a children’s book about a lonely elf-like creature (Toffle) from Moominvalley—for her classroom. I couldn’t keep my eyes off it. If it seems odd to you that a reasonably mature college student would be obsessed with a Finnish children’s book, then you clearly haven’t seen this thing.

Moominvalley—inhabited by dogs with silky coiffes and umbrella hats, gardens of worm-plants and evil-looking humanoids—is a world of pastels, grays and sparse primary colors, slightly tamer than a Seussical landscape. A Moomin troll (a minor character in WWCT?) looks like a cross between a hippopotamus and the Pillsbury Doughboy.

Out of this creepy fantastical world came multiple books, television series, a theme park and most recently, the 2010 movie Moomins and the Comet Chase. Just when you think Moominvalley can’t get any stranger, along comes Bjork with a soundtrack. In the music video for “The Comet Song,” felted Moomin troll puppets straggle through an apocalyptic, painted landscape. Against a lone woodwind and some distant clangs, Bjork mourns, “A co-met, oh dam-mit.” Something tells me Katy Perry would have no problem guest-starring on the Finnish version of Sesame Street (Moominvalley?).

In any case, this cult classic has outlived Jansson, who died in 2001. Fortunately for those of us who appreciate a bizarre aesthetic, there’s no stopping these trolls.