"Everyone knows that a soul is the same size as a beach ball." - Coraline Jones, Coraline

Lately, for whatever reason, I have been reading creepy children’s books.

And they have been wonderful.

I mean, between Terry Pratchett’s The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents, and Neil Gaiman’s Coraline, is it possible – dare we hope – that the age of smarmy children’s literature is fading, and the gloriously terrible age of the Brothers Grimm and Struwwelpeter is returning?

Seriously – just how many I’ll Love You Forevers and Rainbow Fishes and The Giving Trees can one person stomach? (Although they are all frightfully creepy as well, in their own ways...don’t even get me started on the incestuous overtones in just about the only Robert Munsch story I do not like, or my little brother on the Communist underpinnings of that silly, colorful fish.)

Yes, I suppose there are the middle-of-the-road kids' books, the ones with brave heroines who learn something (Because of Winn-Dixie); or intrepid brother-and-sister teams who have great adventures and learn something (Magic Treehouse series); or even cheery animals who teach us all a little moral lesson (Berenstain Bears, whom I loathe to the very core of my being, those sanctimonious, pontificating ursines). There are certainly non-smarmy and realistic children’s books out there – Cynthia Voight, Laurie Halse Anderson, heck even E.L. Konigsburg.

But what I really mean is kids' books with that sense of magic, that sense that anything – really absolutely anything, good or bad - is possible, that you have with the REAL Grimm’s fairy tales, or Gaiman’s fantastical novel, or Terry Pratchett’s edgy silliness, or Julian Thompson’s real-but-not-quite teen novels.

I present for your consideration a rogue's gallery of gritty, intense, pull-no-punches but wonderful children's books (take a memo, feel-good Frindle!):

Roald Dahl's The Story of Henry Sugar can still make me nauseated, and James and the Giant Peach intensely claustrophobic.

Madeleine L’Engle’s Wrinkle in Time gave me nightmares for weeks!

John Bellairs’s books (whose Gorey illustrations alone make them a creepy delight) are tight and suspenseful and by no means all-tied-up-neatly.

You can't ignore the true classics, like the Narnia books, or even better in my opinion, Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy. Could you possibly nonchalantly read about Lyra's lonely journey to the land of the dead, or not feel in the pit of your stomach the terror of the little boy who is separated from his daemon?

In my oh-so-humble opinion, though, Maurice Sendak is THE classic example of exactly what children - even very little children - can appreciate, and what adults like to think kids can’t handle. Sendak’s classic Where the Wild Things Are has been described as “dark and disturbing,” and “far too frightening for young children.”

(Is this when I should confess that I want Max to grow up fast so I can marry him – well, right after I marry Calvin – or Hobbes, whichever one will have me. Hmm, talk about disturbing, eh?)

John Cech wrote…”These fantasies essentially broke through the relatively unperturbed surfaces of postwar American children's literature, sending his [Sendak’s] children…on journeys into regions of the psyche that children's books had not dared visit before."…As author Ann Hulbert writes, "His pictures, and also his texts, bring to life what Bruno Bettelheim called the 'id pressure' — the nightmarish fears, grandiose desires, anger — that buffet children. [From “NOW with Bill Moyers,” The Controversy Over Children’s Literature.]

When did editors and publishers decide that kids cannot handle anything scary?

Do they really think that if only kids are protected from ghosties and ghoulies and things that go bump in the night, they will not imagine the ghost in the hallway, the monster in the closet, the beast under the bed? (Or the bully on the playground, the nasty middle-schoolers on the bus, the casual cruelty of the average junior-high-schooler?)

When Primo was about two, I thought it’d be a good idea to take him with me on a peace march. You know, show him his mom is politically aware and active, and tries to stand up for what she believes in. What I didn’t count on was the girl who marched the route wearing a gas mask. Primo was terrified, even though I explained carefully that there was a real person under the mask, that it was just a mask like a Halloween mask. He talked about that gas mask for weeks after, at all sorts of weird times.
And I will never ever forget the chill that went up my spine when one day, sitting in his room, he looked out in the hall and said matter-of-factly, “Oh, there’s the lady with the gas mask.” I didn’t want to turn around, I didn’t want to look, even though my ADULT brain knew there was no one or nothing there in the hallway.

Kids take what they see and what they experience and turn it and twist it and examine it from all angles in their weird and strangely practical little kid brains. And let me tell you, now that I know at least one five-year-old very well? Those brains are no more normal and sunshine-y than any adults; in fact, I would argue that kids see what’s there, and what could be there. They see the possibilities as well as the reality. They are willing to accept that the possibilities can be gruesome or frightening as soon as be cheery or optimistic. We adults are the ones who want kids to be happy and innocent.

Lord of the Flies, anyone?

I suppose I’ll go back to reading adult novels now – Peter Carey’s Theft: A Love Story is up next, although Coraline did prompt me to request Gaiman’s Preludes and Nocturnes (the first Sandman volume) from the library - so you can be spared my psycho-babbling. (Incidentally, Coraline and this Bookslut interview also prompted me to fall madly in lust with Neil Gaiman. Who is *extremely* cute. See? And he also rocks that maddening-hair-in-his-eyes look.)

But I think I am going to put my old childhood Raggedy Ann doll away in the blanket trunk before I go to bed tonight. Those black button eyes of hers are freaking me out a bit.