Ten Great Books For (Traumatizing) Children (with a poll)

The House That Crack Built is great! My mom has a copy.

Belloc's Cautionary Tales are unquestionably the best, and indeed some of the finest childrens' stories ever told

the Nazi propaganda one is probably the worst

'probably'

no Struwwelpeter? Hopelessly outdated (written in 1845!), but the copy my maternal grandmother bought for my brother and I when we were about 6 and 4 shat us up real good. So good in fact that the book had to be placed facedown at all times if it was off the shelves, lest we should see Peter's dreadful visage.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Struwwelpeter

Yeah, it's tempting to go for the Horse or Alfie's Home because they are such bad books, but it's hard to argue with...

"Father, isn't there any way to protect oneself from these beasts?"

"Certainly," says the farmer. "Much has been done to alleviate the effects of a snake bite. There are medicines that, if used quickly, can save the lives of those who are bitten in many cases. But the poisonous snakes are still there. They threaten man and beast every day. To protect against these creatures, there is only one real solution..."

"I know what it is, father," Else interrupts. ""One has to destroy the poisonous snakes."

The farmer nods grimly.

"That's right, my child. One has to destroy the poisonous snakes! One must find them wherever one can. One must make their offspring harmless. One must hunt them down without pity and exterminate them in all the nations of the world. If we do not kill the poisonous snakes, they will kill us!

Read more here!

Once saw the Tiger Lilies' stage interpretation of Struwwelpeter and it was great!

Write-in for Baaa. So good -- somewhere between soylent green and the road.

It shows I have read so little children's books: I thought these were jokes!

(It also shows that migraine deteriorate my ability to speak proper English. Now if you'll excuse while I'll go soak my head in tar.)

Just like the bacterium, the Jews bring plague and decline to the peoples they infect by race mixing and infecting Gentile peoples with Jewish thinking. They maintain, for example, that all humans are equal. But that is not true. It is a terrible lie! … said the happy flower to the sad old snail.”

fucking fascist happy flowers

Nathalie, almost no one would ever have seen or heard of these books -- most of them are self-published horrors, done in small quantities and probably not recognized by major publishers or major bookstores. One exception is Outside Over There, which is written and illustrated by the famous Maurice Sendak, but is pretty widely known to be one of his weirder and less popular books.

http://www.sagen.at/texte/maerchen/maerchen_deutschland/hoffmann/images/daumenlutscher_3.jpg

Sleep tight.

gah, alfie's home: http://www.collegeclassifieds.com/blog/?p=11

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Another write-in, for Raymond Briggs' comic 'When the Wind Blows': two old clueless people die slowly and horribly of radiation poisoning. Not actually written for kids, but I borrowed this from our school library just after reading Fungus the Bogeyman at around the age of 6. It broke me.

Pay attention," Melli says, "and I will tell you. The drones are bees too, like us. But they do not help our people, they only harm it. They do not work. They laze away the whole day. The only thing they do is eat! Yes, eat! They eat everything that we have collected for our ourselves, our people and our children. They make us poor, and they are absolutely insolent. Just yesterday a drone punched me so that I fell and nearly broke a leg.

The visual image of A BEE doing this to another BEE is giving me guilty hysterics.

there's a cartoon of where the wind blows that you shouldn't watch

the Bible is pretty fucked up and children have that fuckin' doorstop forced on them all the time

Better you hang a millstone around your neck & throw yourself into the sea than offend a child with such a thing.

fuckin' a

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

The people have spoken.

And they've said "neigh".

This one is possibly too mature for children, but I would still like to read it:

http://www2.xlibris.com/bookstore/bookdisplay.aspx?bookid=49194

Actually it seems to have been written by a child (or a very old man).