Tag Archives: Monsters in children’s books

Bravery Has Got to Be Carefully Taught

Posted on by
Reply

Childhood is prone to the many manifestations of fear. Fear of being small, fear of being powerless, fear of all kinds of things on four, six, and eight legs, fear of elderly relatives with strange faces who insist on hugs and kisses, fear of the house where the mean boy lives that’s on the way to school… And books.  A Gothic novelist recently confessed that her younger self loved being scared out of her wits by scary tales.  Some people agree it’s a healthy way to come to terms with the dark side, others are triggered at the sight of a closed book they know contains something awful.

When picture book creators try to dispel fears now, they tinker with strategies to address the source of anxiety and feelings which bubble up.  Showing a non-human character dealing with it, as did Maria Nilsson Thore in A Pack of Your Own (2020; English translation 2022), is a way to put some distance between the reader and the fear.  “The best thing and the worst thing in the world is other dogs,” sighs the dachshund sitting on the radiator in his bathrobe, looking out the window at the dog park.“The best thing about other dogs is that they seem to have a lot of fun together.  How wonderful it must be to belong to a pack!”  Then he remembers all their disgusting habits, like sniffing bottoms, walking on all fours, and defecating anywhere.  He can’t imagine finding another dog who also loves coffee, solves crosswords, and collects vintage sticks.  It’s lone wolfhood for him.   But he unexpectedly makes a friend with a poodle who follows him home after the disastrous visit to the dog park and makes herself at home.  On the rear endpapers, they play catch their own way in hats on two legs at the dog park with the pack.

Friends offering reassurance at tense moments can also defuse fears.  Meg Rosoff’s Jumpy Jack and Googily (2008) illustrated by Sophie Blackall features the odd couple, a large timorous snail Jack oblivious to the fact that his patient blue friend Googily is a monster.  Jack can’t enjoy a stroll because he sees danger lurking everywhere.  There’s a tree!  Could there be a monster behind it?  Googily obligingly goes over and checks even though it’s barely big enough to conceal a squirrel.  Oh no, there’s the tool shed–what if a monster is hiding inside?   Googily inspects the premises and reassures him no one there.  Coming home doesn’t quiet Jack’s nerves.  Googily can’t believe that his runaway imagination has conjured up a monster with long thin feet under the tea table, but he still makes sure there’s nothing there.   Of course, when they retire Jack makes Googily check under the bed.  Surprise! A sock is there, the one thing which terrifies the agreeable monster.  Seng Soun Ratanavanh’s George and His Nightime Friends (2020) must be the most beautiful and tranquil of any picture book dealing with insomnia. Alone at night, the solitary little boy George can’t fall asleep even after mentally travelling to marvellous places.  Once that stops, he suddenly becomes frightened by the dark and imagines monsters in the shadows.  When he wishes out loud for a friend, a little mouse answers and asks him to follow her downstairs, where he choses a book from Mole the librarian, listens to rabbit practice for a concert, takes a bath with a penguin afraid of water, plays badminton with a panda and then all of them enjoy sweets prepared by a pig in the kitchen. Now George is so relaxed he feels sleepy.  His new nighttime friends walk him back up the stairs and tuck him into bed.  Where did they come from? The sharp-eyes will see them in the form of toys on the floor or framed pictures hang on the wall of the stairway.  Perhaps they can return any and every night to play away George’s uneasiness.The “social story” by Certified Child Life Specialist Rachel Tepfer Copeland, I Can Be  A Superhero During a Lockdown, takes the bull by the horns, without ever mentioning an active shooter.  Instructions to obey the adult in charge, be absolutely quiet, and stay still are repeated over and over again like a drum roll puzzles until the reader realizes the author decided to write a book that would prepare her two special needs sons and all children like them for this kind of emergency by giving them jobs which when executed without deviation will elevate them to superherohood.  Copeland acknowledges the possibility of being frightened and wavering from the tasks in the child’s voice.  As he repeats the rules in each situation he is likely to encounter, their chanting keeps up his spirits and confidence that he will be able to do the jobs which will keep him, his friends and teacher safe.All four books have such kind, reassuring hearts it feels curmudgeonly to turn over the complicated questions they raise about protecting children from their fears. To what extent can young listeners learn from non-human characters when their behavior in the story really blurs the line between the two far more than an Aesopian fable?  Will the child feel betrayed by the eventual realization that the conflicting desire to fit into a social group with few or no compromises is rarely resolved joyfully–or outgrown. If the characters can’t two and two together, will the reader pick up on the illogicality of fearing a creature with a heart of gold with bug eyes, sharp teeth that curl into a dreadful smile, horrible  scary hair, two fingers on each hand, and long thin feet?  How far should an illustrator go reversing the associations of the shadowy black night?  The only projection of George’s fears in the gorgeous dreamscape drawing in a palette of greens is the patch of floral wallpaper with a repeat of carnivorous plants over his shoulder.  As much as I like the clever books by Thone, Rosoff and Blackall, and Ratanvanh, they have the luxury of sidestepping fear by aestheticizing or poking fun at it.  By comparison Copeland’s blunt solution ends up being surprisingly moving because of the way she urges the child to embrace strength and not weakness associated with difference.  He is shown that obeying and doing his jobs it is possible to triumph against the odds and protect others.  It is too bad to have to admit in real life it may not turn out so well.

Thoroughly Modern Ogres

Posted on by
Reply

Gustave Dore’s rendering of the ogre’s discovery of little Thumb and his brothers.

The Oxford English Dictionary succinctly defines an ogre as “a man-eating monster, usually represented as a hideous giant” in folklore and mythology.  It comes from the French via Perrault’s fairy tales (its mate is an “ogress” and their offspring an “ogrichon” according to Mme d’ Aulnoy).   No ogre is welcome when scouring the countryside for its next meal, whether it happens to be a good supply of baby belly buttons, which by oni, the ogres of Japan, relish, or a brace of fat boys rolled in bread crumbs and fried in butter, the favorite dish of the giant Snap-‘em up in Uncle David’s nonsensical story from Catherine Sinclair’s Holiday House (1839).  The ogres I’ve found in picture books from the last ten years seem to belong to an altogether different subspecies.The title of Michael Morpurgo’s The Ogre Who Wasn’t (2023) gives fair warning.  A somewhat forced reinvention of Grimms’ The Frog Prince is odd place to invoke the presence of a monster.  Motherless Princess Clara discovers a teeny tiny ogre in the garden and stows him under the bed in a hot pink character shoe.  Because her father is away most of the time, the disagreeable servants try to constrain her but she defies them by keeping  an extensive  menagerie in her room and running wild barefoot in the garden in dirty shorts with uncombed hair. One evening she confides her pain to her best friend the loyal little ogre, who reveals that he is really the Toad King and has magical powers, which can be put at her service.  He grants her wishes to scrap the help and give her a stay-at-home dad with a nice new wife.  There is nothing more for the new racially blended family to do in this sweetly vapid story but live happily ever after.The creature in Peter McCarty’s 2009 picture book Jeremy Draws a Monster is quite satisfying–big, blue, and bulky with multiple horny protrusions, pinpoint eyes, big nostrils and bare earholes (funny preparatory drawings turn up on the endpapers).  But things go awry almost immediately.  It wants a sandwich, when it ought to threaten Jeremy, a much more substantial mouthful.  It wants consumer goods to help pass the time, including a television so it can watch the game.  Wearing a dandy red hat, it goes out on the town and hogs the single bed when it gets back very late. That is the last straw.  Jeremy draws a suitcase and one-way bus ticket and escorts the big blue pest to the station in the morning.  Then he joins the neighborhood kids in games for the first time.  Obviously the ogre is a projection of Jeremy’s imagination, which probably explains why his creation won’t eat him and goes without putting up a fight.  If it isn’t real and only looks dangerous, then the story deflates without any conflict between the two unequal characters. Even if the point were that monsters are all in your head, of which I’m unconvinced, the imagination demands the possibility of them being real.Leave it to David Sedaris to think up Pretty Ugly (2024), a typically weird story, the last to be illustrated by the late Ian Falconer.  Dedicated to Tiffany, Sedaris’s sister who committed suicide, he also pays tribute to the ability of sister Amy to make ghastly faces. Whenever the adorable little ogrichon Anna is awful, she is so good that her parents and grandmother coo that she really is “something.”  Her bad habit of making dreadful faces–adoring gran starts at the fuzzy bunny gran–prompts her mother to warns her quite correctly that if she doesn’t stop it, she’s going to be sorry.  Anna dismisses her concern, until the features of her most horrible face of all (shown to the left) cannot be reversed.  Even a medical intervention fails to restore her face to its original loveliness. While her loving family can live with their little monstrosity in a new guise, her peer group has no problem reminding how her how hideous she is now.  After secluding herself in the wood shed for a miserable three days, Anna remembers her grandmother’s consoling words about true inner beauty and sticks her hand down her throat to turn herself inside out, which solves the problem (below).  There is nothing traditional about this ogre story, but if they ever start creating picture books about family life, they could do worse than take Sedaris as their literary model. I’m not sure why authors and illustrators who have been busy reinventing Western folklore’s traditional baddies have smoothed off most of their rough edges. As monsters go, an ogre is terrifying, but otherwise uncomplicated. It stomps around, uses brute force to capture people, and devours them, sometimes with guests. Maybe it tosses the bones into a large, grisly, untidy heap outside its dwelling place. Still, a  brave and quick-thinking child like Little Thumb  has a shot at defeating one.  But perhaps the classic stand-off between big and small compares unfavorably with old and modern stories about Japanese yokai and requires big injections of horror and violence to hold its own in today’s media environment.  Time to clap if you believe in ogres?