Dark corners of the children’s library

On Dahl, Silverstein, and the modern classics of grotesque literature for kids

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Peace, Love, & Concrete,

Paul

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We’re reading a chapter book to our daughters about a little boy who mixes up a special medicine for his grandma, who he thinks might be a witch.

One of our girls cackles when I read the ingredients: Laundry detergent. Gin. Horse pills. Antifreeze. 

It’s a Roald Dahl book called George’s Marvellous Medicine. I don’t know how it ends yet, but given that it’s Roald Dahl, I can only assume it gets weirder. There’s a little disclaimer at the front of some editions that says you shouldn’t try to make George’s medicine at home, and I can’t tell if it’s a sly joke or an earnest addition from the publisher’s legal department.

Reading macabre stories to our children is a form of trust-building. It says that we trust them not to do anything harmful, that we know they love us and won’t try to poison us. It also means we recognize they are just grown-up enough to enjoy a little darkness.

I wasn’t a big Dahl fan as a child, but I carried a faint memory into adulthood of another dark book about a lion who defended his pride. I used to describe its vague outline and its scratchy ink-pen drawings to friends in hopes that they could help me find it, but nobody ever knew what I was talking about. Then one day I found it at the Blue Bicycle bookstore in Charleston.

It was Lafcadio: The Lion Who Shot Back by Shel Silverstein, and I bought it on the spot and read it at night without the children.

The book was way, way darker than I remembered. Lafcadio didn’t just fight the safari hunters or eat them whole; he blew them away with a stolen rifle. I hadn’t recalled the ending at all, which was elegiac and shattering and left me feeling lonely. I haven’t read it to my kids yet; I don’t know when they’ll be ready. 

I can’t remember which of my elementary school teachers read Lafcadio to our class, but I have a vivid memory of sitting on a carpet square in my suburban Texas public school and loving every minute of it. What was that teacher thinking? Did she know this story was originally published in Playboy? Did she know something about the way kids’ brains work? I sure enjoyed it more than The Rainbow Fish, I’ll tell you that much. I still love Lafcadio and am deeply moved by it.

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For this week’s newsletter I’d like to consider three examples of dark picture books for young children. I found these on our regular trips to the public library, where we go to keep a fresh rotation of bedtime stories.

I think all three of these books are quite good, but I haven’t read the third one with my children yet, and you’ll see why in a minute. 

I Am Henry Finch By Alexis Deacon / Illustrated by Viviane Schwarz (Candlewick Press, 2015) 

Synopsis: A finch stands up to the Beast who has been terrorizing his flock, then has an existential crisis in the belly of the Beast. All of the birds are illustrated with human fingerprints for their abdomens, so you know this book has something to say about identity.

The Darkness: After coming to a realization of profound philosophical — maybe even theological — significance (“I AM, he thought”), Henry meditates on the brutality of nature and the universality of suffering (“IT IS, he thought”). There’s a two-page diagram of eggs hatching, birds eating plants, the Beast killing animals to feed its young, and dead beasts returning to the soil to enrich the plants.

Rating: 4 out of 5 Jungian heroes’ journeys

The Dark By Lemony Snicket / Illustrated by Jon Klassen (Little, Brown and Company, 2013) 

Synopsis: A boy named Laszlo confronts his fear of the dark by talking to the dark, which speaks back in the middle of the night and guides him to the basement. Klassen’s gouache illustrations of the house are flecked with black splatter, like a Ralph Steadman cartoon.

The Darkness: I’m certain this isn’t the first book to deal with children’s fear of the dark, but I appreciate its unflinching approach and lines like this one: “You might be afraid of the dark, but the dark is not afraid of you. That’s why the dark is always close by.” 

Rating: 8 out of 10 voids

Duck, Death and the Tulip By Wolf Erlbruch (Gecko Press, 2011)

Synopsis: I can’t sum it up any better than the book jacket: “... a duck strikes up an unlikely friendship with Death.”

The Darkness: This book forces you to ponder what the world will look like without you in it. When the duck asks questions about the existence of an afterlife, Death just stares back. The book reminds me of a piece of advice I got one time from a grief counselor, who said that when children start asking questions, you should answer as simply as possible and admit when you don’t know an answer.

(As an aside, when my children do ask about the afterlife, I won’t reach for Duck, Death and the Tulip or a Veggie Tales book about heaven. I will just talk with them.)

Rating: All the skulls

In writing about literature, I have to fight my own deep-seated Protestant impulse to justify its existence. Why tell stories? What good do they do? 

Shortly after Protestant notions about childhood became widespread in England and its colonies during the 16th century, sects like the Puritans became obsessed with creating a wholesome Children’s Literature that they could use to indoctrinate sinful young minds. From English translations of Mother Goose to James Janeway’s A token for children: Being an exact account of the conversion, holy and exemplary lives, and joyful deaths of several young children, books for kids laid the groundwork for what we now call “edutainment.”

The Puritans would probably hate all of the books I mentioned above because they share a certain sense of ambiguity. They aren’t morality tales or even cautionary tales; they don’t warn children that they’ll be eaten by monsters if they wander off into the woods.

These books are simply dark and stunning, like a bag of salted Dutch licorice or a nice heavy guitar riff on a black metal album.

I think that’s enough to warrant writing a book, or reading one. If I can appreciate art for art’s sake, then so can my 4-year-olds. We’ve still got time before all of their reading must conform with grade-level learning standards and fit neatly into the confines of a book report. I intend to make the most of our time.

***

I had a kindly old middle school principal who used to go from classroom to classroom reading us selections from the 1981 collection Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. He always made sure to draw out the suspense and show us the grisly charcoal-and-ink illustrations. We were maybe a little too old for storytime, but we ate it up. My wife, who went to the same middle school, still has vivid memories of a story about a murderer in the backseat of a car.

I didn’t know at the time that the author of Scary Stories, Alvin Schwartz, was a folklorist. Turns out the book is a collection of folk tales, campfire ghost stories, and urban legends that got passed around for years, mouth to ear, before he wrote them down.

I also had no idea the book and its sequels (More Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark and Scary Stories 3: More Tales to Chill Your Bones) were so controversial. The American Library Association places the series at No. 1 on its list of the most challenged books of the 1990s. Parents were apparently concerned about their kids being exposed to cannibalism, gore, and occult themes.

A Seattle parent named Sandy Vanderburg helped lead the national campaign to keep the book out of young children’s hands, telling the Chicago Tribune in 1993:

“There's no moral to them. The bad guys always win. And they make light of death. There's a story called 'Just Delicious’ about a woman who goes to a mortuary, steals another woman's liver, and feeds it to her husband. That's sick."

The books sparked controversy for a different reason in 2011 when HarperCollins re-released them with new, cleaner-looking illustrations by Brett Helquist. Adult fans revolted, demanding that the publisher bring back the grotesque original illustrations by Stephen Gammell that they remembered from childhood.

“Gammell's black and white monsters and images of exploding spider nests burrowing under your skin make children everywhere cry,” Meredith Woerner wrote in Gizmodo at the time. “They're beautiful and horrifying at the same time (and still haunt some of my most spectacular fever dreams even to this day).”

Woerner was right. There’s a pleasure and a thrill in being haunted, and I won’t deny it to my children. 

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The illustrations at the top and bottom of the page are from Struwwelpeter: Merry Stories and Funny Pictures, an 1845 collection of German bedtime stories by Heinrich Hoffman.