Creepy Children’s Books

One rainy April morn I plucked from some dim corridor of my mind memories of books I read as a wee bairn. Munching sweets and quaffing coke as I undoubtedly did while reading them, some of the more disturbing aspects didn’t quite manage to penetrate the mighty wall of sugar that spewed forth from my eyeballs. As a 21 year old bairn, they irk me somewhat.

Stig of the Dump

‘Fucking sweet as’, I thought as an eight year old: ‘a fucking caveman’. It sounded great: makin’ fire, catchin’ burglars, improvin’ dens, all with a new caveman friend. Never did it occur to me why there was a caveman in Barney’s dump. Never, in fact, does it occur to Barney. Had Stig travelled through time? Is Stig even real, or a figment of his imagination? The answer is either a screwed up kid or physics far too advanced for this age group. Eery.

Tom’s Midnight Garden

In Narnia-esque fashion, Tom is sent to a country house where he discovers a realm of unparalleled fantasy. In non-Narnia-esque fashion, it’s not utter shite. His loneliness is rectified when the clock strikes twelve and a magical garden materialises behind the house, a place where he regularly returns to meet the same girl at varying ages. As dark as it is nonchalant in its weaving of the tale of a ghost girl’s psychologically projected magical garden, it’s a disconcerting, ambiguous mystery, and one that’ll have you shifting in your seat. A really beautiful book, but unnerving.

A Dog So Small

How this is for kids baffles me. It is traumatising in no smaller degree than it is sad. An autistic boy desperately, desperately wants a dog, but it is disallowed because of his disability. He so wants a dog; he would really, really love a dog; it’s all he wants in the whole world. It’s the only thing that would make him happy. The punchline to this book: he doesn’t get a dog. It’s heartbreaking!

5 Children and It

It seems like there should be a morally-edifying-cautionary-tale aspect to this book, but it’s not entirely clear what it is. Released in 1902 this is to all extents and purposes Victorian, and they didn’t screw around. If they weren’t sending kids up chimneys they were drawing terrifying gargoyle creatures that give spookily clad children ‘wishes’. Again, it’s the lack of information that’s unsettling about this. What the hell is a ‘Psammead’, the ‘it’ of the title, and where did it come from? Creepy devil monsters prattling on about the Stone Age and almost getting kids scalped isn’t a line of narrative that would fly for the children’s publishers of 2012.

Watership Down

Containing Nazi allusions, warren destruction and a few shoulder-shrug rabbit deaths, this one never sat well with me. For anyone who read String Lug the Fox, it’s written with that same air of threat all the way through. Rabbits are vulnerable little things, and you can’t be certain they’re all going to be happy little hoppers by the end. It’s always possible they’ll happily hop their way under the wheels of truck or hippity-skip in front of the barrel of a shotgun. The blatant TV rip-off, The Animals of Farthing Wood, was equally harrowing.