Children's Fabulous Nightmares

Last night I had the worst nightmare I’ve had for a long time. When I woke up, for a moment, I forgot I’m 30 and my boyfriend would be able to help me in any battle against witches I might have to undertake. It made me think about being a child, being scared, and how it can take us back to a kind of essential version of ourselves. Childhood is dark. When we are scared as adults, we visit that place again, physically - our eyes widen, our legs become unstable, our voices high pitched - we are not in control anymore. As adults some of us seek out scary things – from horror movies to extreme sports, cage diving with a great white shark, and ghost stories. Being scared is part of being alive, an important part, and in the right conditions, it’s enjoyable.

Here in the bookshop, we have a mixture of children’s picture books – the funny ones, the ones that focus on the things children enjoy - the idea (perhaps not the reality) of picnics, collecting things, speaking to animals, becoming all powerful, making a mess. I was taking a close look at our collection because I had a very particular customer, who found the concept of pirates too violent in a picture book, and didn’t believe in dinosaurs. Everything from the BFG to Where the Wild Things Are was too frightening for a child in her opinion. She ended up settling on a factual book about the seasons. Not that it’s not a nice book, but the idea that this child gets seasons and no pirates, seasons and no monsters and seasons and no dinosaurs seems a bit grim to me.

I know from a friend of mine, an award-winning children’s illustrator who is published in several different countries including France, Korea and Sweden, that England’s parents, or England’s children’s publishers, don’t think that their kids can cope with the darker aspects of children’s literature.

Most of us know this is nonsense. Anyone who can remember back to their favourite picture books - was it the beautifully drawn oak tree that you came back to again and again, to study to try and understand, to trace your fingers over and try to see something in it that you hadn’t seen before, or was it the dark with the glowing eyes and the yellow claws?

Childhood is where imaginative fear comes from, the fear of the wolf man, who exists because your older brother says he does, the fear of the half-man half-monkey who according to your friend lives on Dartmoor, of the nightmares which have no reason not to be true, you wake from them and think If it’s in my head what’s to stop it being in my room? So here are the picture books that made me lay awake at night, and which, I think, fuelled my nightmares and my enthusiasm for making up stories.

Gorilla by Anthony Browne - the story is dark - a young girl is continually let down by her father, and then (in my child¹s head version of the story which differs slightly from the truth) a gorilla steals her, and may have consumed the father as well, seeing as he is wearing the father’s coat and hat. But Browne’s drawings are so spectacular, as a kid they introduce a new and unnamed emotion - melancholy.

John Brown, Rose and the Midnight Cat by Jenny Wagner - speaking of melancholy, this is a book about a little old lady, Rose, living in the bush with her sheepdog, John Brown. When a black cat shows up and Rose enjoys its company John Brown gets jealous and locks the cat out. Rose takes to her bed and won’t get up until the cat is let back inside again. I used to read this over and over as a kid and try to work out why it frightened me so much.

Outside Over There by Maurice Sendak - The dad goes to sea which makes the mum go insane. Ida has to look after her baby sister, but when she takes her eyes off her for a moment, the goblins steal her. She goes in search of her sister, and finds her about to be wed to a goblin. All the goblins, it turns out, are babies. She drowns them all and the two of them return home. This one gives you that feeling of falling you get in dreams.

The Bunyip of Berkeley's Creek by Jenny Wagner - I think this picture book pretty much dictated how I wrote my novel. The bunyip is sort of friendly and sad, but he’s scary to look at, not Gruffalo scary, but nightmare scary - the dimensions of his face are disturbing and led me, for a long time, to distrust anyone with a long philtrum. The Bunyip wakes up in a billabong in the dark and does not know what he is. The other bush creatures are unkind and cold and then he is told he does not exist by a horrifying looking psychologist. My favourite book ever.

For more recent excellent books that treat your child like an intelligent imaginative person:

Why? by Nikolai Popov - A wordless picture book in which a peaceful frog is the victim of an unprovoked mouse attack.

While You Are Sleeping by Alexis Deacon. The illustrations are beautiful, dark and full of movement, and the story is about the soft toys you sleep with, who come alive at night to check in drawers and underneath the bed for things that might be lurking there. You should also check out Beegu, an beautiful long-eared 3-eyed alien, lost on earth and missing his parents.

Duck, Death and the Tulip by Wolf Erlbruch - It’s about a duck meeting death, ‘You've come to fetch me?' asks the terrified Duck  ‘Oh, I‘ve been close by all your life,' says Death. It breaks the taboo, and it’s sweet with out being sentimental, the drawings are breathtaking. Marvelous.

These are the books that give us the things that will scare us for the rest of our lives. It’s not missed mortgage payments or falling house prices that wake us shouting in the middle of the night, it’s the lady in the corner of the room with the sharpened teeth and the too-long philtrum.