Kermit the Frog and other terrors: the appeal of scary children's books

A Wisconsin woman wants kids kept away from the popular puppet’s ‘traumatic’ book about poverty, but children crave disturbing stories

We’d go to the library once a week when I was little. While my little sister always chose to take home Anthony Browne’s Gorilla, I would uneasily check to see if a certain title was there. Just looking at the cover frightened me almost too much to bear, but I couldn’t resist doing it. Actually taking it out to read would take months of steeling my courage.

The book was Kevin Crossley-Holland’s The Dead Moon and Other Tales from East Anglia and the Fen Country, illustrated by Shirley Felts. The title story, in which the moon comes down one night to investigate the “things that live in the darkness”, was my object of terror. Looking at the front cover still makes me shudder. The moon, trapped. The witches. God. You can read a bit of it here – I still think it’s brilliant – and look at the front cover they used in the 80s, if you dare.

I’m reminded of my childhood terrors by this Los Angeles Times story, about a Wisconsin mother (and chairwoman of the Central Wisconsin Tea Party) trying to have a book pulled from her local kindergarten over fears it will “traumatise” children. The unlikely culprit? Jim Henson’s For Every Child, a Better World, in which “the familiar character of Kermit the Frog teaches young readers about the plight of young children who lack the basic human necessities, and the efforts of the United Nations to provide such essentials as housing, water, food, and medical aid”.

“Unfortunately in this world there is a lot of war and strife and poverty; I understand that,” says the Wisconsin mother. “I just don’t know how appropriate that is to be teaching that to five-year-olds.”

Here is an image from the book: yes, it’s upsetting, but it’s not traumatising. It’s thoughtful, I think, providing a jump-off to discuss the reality of those who are less fortunate.

I much prefer author and illustrator Shaun Tan’s response to those books from childhood which haunt – traumatise? – us well into adulthood. In this fabulous piece in Publishers Weekly, in which they’ve asked a series of children’s authors including Philip Pullman and Lois Lowry to name their favourite childhood books, Tan plumps for Orwell’s Animal Farm, which his mother read to him when he was about eight, believing it to be a straightforward children’s book. “Of course we all found it pretty disturbing soon enough, and Mum seriously considered quitting when the violence and treachery set in – worrying that it might ‘warp our little minds’ as she later recalled – but we passed a unanimous family vote to continue because the story was just so compelling,” says Tan.

“Would I read it to my own daughter? That’s for her to decide and put to a family vote. Too often I’ve read parental reviews of my own books for young people, discounting them as scary and inappropriate. As a parent, I don’t necessarily disagree. As a former kid, I only regret that younger peers may be denied the chance to decide for themselves, and I appreciate that real reading is an act of interpretation, not just the reception of existing ideas.”

My own daughters are two and five. The smaller one is obsessed with Room on the Broom, largely because she is horribly frightened by the dragon. “Are dragons real?” she asks on a regular basis. “No dragons are going to come into our house.” She loves it. The big one cowers in gleeful terror as the sea witch circles in Gobbolino. She looks at the copy of Neil Gaiman’s Coraline I have lying around, asking me to tell her about the Other Mother’s button eyes. She regularly extracts The Witches from the bookshelf: she loves Roald Dahl, and has looked through the pictures, but, like me with Crossley-Holland, hasn’t quite summoned up the courage to read it. She knows dragons aren’t real, but says witches are, after our Swedish friend explained why people were lighting bonfires on Midsummer’s Eve.

I don’t know what the books will be that end up haunting them. I adore watching them discover the comedy, the excitement, the terrors of literature, and I think Shaun Tan has it exactly right: “Reading is a matter for each of us to decide”. I might track down some Tan titles to go under the Christmas tree, along, I think, with Kermit the Frog’s alarming volume. I’m also planning on buying the excellent Nosy Crow’s Refuge, £5 of which will go to War Child. Written by Anne Booth and illustrated by Sam Usher, it is a retelling of the Christmas story, inspired by refugee children everywhere.

I’m not sure any of us are quite ready for The Dead Moon.

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