Terrifying Fiction for Children

The most terrifying book I've ever read was written for 9 year olds. I just finished reading Coraline, by Neil Gaiman and let me tell you that Frankenstein and Stephen King and the movie Gothic (which was perhaps the most disturbing thing I've ever seen) have nothing on this book.

In case you are unfamiliar with the story of Coraline; the book is about a little girl who finds a doorway in her house that leads to an alternate world where everything is the same but different. There, Coraline meets her 'other mother' and 'other father' who have buttons for eyes. Anyway, Coraline's other mother kidnaps her real parents and tries to make Coraline stay with her forever and sew buttons into her eyes and make her play with singing rats (not singing rats in a cute way either, singing rats in a Kujo sort of way). The other mother has a whole closet full of dead children and she keeps their souls in marbles.

The weird thing is, if I read this about eight years ago, I wouldn't have seen anything wrong with this story. My theory is that children have a whole different scale of measuring what is scary in what isn't. As adults, we're pretty well acclimated to the physical world where there are guns and stabbings and robberies and murders. Not to say that adults aren't afraid of these things, but we understand that the world follows a set of predetermined rules that limit the likely hood of those sorts of things happening to us. We understand the risks and we know how to avoid them. It's psychological horror that really bothers grown ups.

Let's consider the button eyes for a moment. To an adult, the idea of a 'toy' coming to life is the stuff of horror movies, but, for a kid, it's a dream. More specifically, I think that eyes are the focus of a lot of psychological fear. I took a class on Literary Theory two semesters ago during which we read a lot of Freud. Freud asserts the fear of blindness is one of the deepest and most primal fears, common to all people. We can see this all throughout history and mythology, going back to the myth of Odin who had to sacrifice his right eye for knowledge. The idea of the loss of an eye is firmly lodged in the subconscious  Which is why the idea of Coraline having buttons sewn in her eyes is really, really disturbing.

So, for adults, it's a terrifying book. Lemony Snicket reviewed Coraline and he said "this book tells a fascinating and disturbing story that frightened me nearly to death. Unless you want to find yourself hiding under your bed, with your thumb in your mouth, trembling with fear and making terrible noises, I suggest that you step very slowly away from this book and go find another source of amusement, such as investigating an unsolved crime or making a small animal out of yarn." 

I think that it's the other way around for kids. Like, Game of Thrones is one of my favorite TV shows and people are always getting beheaded and eviscerated and stuff and I'm all like 'so what?'. That's the sort of thing that normally scares children. But, if I ever saw someone with button eyes, I would totally lose it. I think that this is true of a lot of fiction for children. I don't know if you ever really thought about Disney movies, but a lot of them are not appropriate for children. Like, Ariel trades her voice for a pair of legs on pain of eternal thralldom and we're all okay with that? Paging Doctor Faustus. A lot of fairy tales are truly terrifying, but they are terrifying in an adult sort of way.

In his review of Coraline, Terry Pratchett wrote "It has the delicate horror of the finest fairy tales, and it is a masterpiece. And you will never think about buttons in quite the same way again."  

I recently read another of Neil Gaiman's books for children, The Graveyard Book, which is about a little boy whose parents are murdered and is subsequently adopted by ghosts. While I really enjoyed the book, I have to say that I thought the content was a little strong for children. The book starts with the words "there was a hand in the darkness, and it held a knife...the knife had done almost everything it was brought to that house to do, and both the blade and the handle were wet." Like, on the first page of the book, we already have three, brutal knife murders. That's not okay!

I mean, don't get me wrong, I loved both books, I just don't think they're appropriate for grown-ups.

Just readin'