Lost in a Good Book

Sharp edged: an illustration from Heinrich Hoffmann’s classic Der Struwwelpeter.

I read this article in this mornings paper and I thought it was really interesting. It is good to know that there are still people out there determined to give kids decent stories that do not always have to be sunshine and lollipops. Kids love the gruesome and scary, and the possibility and threat of violence; personally I think the violence and scary in kids books are a lot better than adult books. This article was written by Kath Dolan, and there is a link at the bottom to read the article on the Sydney Morning Herald‘s website.

Children’s author Margaret Wild vividly recalls the terror and fascination she felt as a child devouring the gruesome, darkly humorous cautionary tales of 19th-century German author (and psychiatrist) Heinrich Hoffmann in Der Struwwelpeter. His protagonists included an unfortunate girl named Harriet who played with matches and was burnt to death, and Conrad, a thumb-sucker, who had his offending digits snipped off with scissors. ”That mutilation of children’s bodies was the most disturbing thing I’d ever read,” says Wild, whose books include Vampyre, Woolvs in the Sitee and Fox. ”I was fascinated by them.”

For a five-year-old John Marsden (Tomorrow, When the War Began; Creep Street; So Much to Tell You), it was Dorothy Wall’s Blinky Bill that was most disturbing. ”The scene where Blinky’s father gets shot, I found that overwhelming, really traumatic,” he recalls. ”I read it with a sense of horror. I’m not sure whether that was so much fear as shock and grief, I suppose. I don’t think there was a book that scared me in the sense of it gave me nightmares or anything, but that was the one I felt just blown away by.”

US author and illustrator Tony DiTerlizzi (The Spiderwick Chronicles, The Spider and the Fly) was ”creeped out” by the tales of Hans Christian Andersen, the Brothers Grimm and Andrew Lang (The Red Fairy Book), and the illustrations of Arthur Rackham.

Formative: Margaret Wild read Heinrich Hoffmann's violent masterpiece Der Struwwelpeter (above) in horror. Photo: Simon Alekna

British-born Nick Falk (Troggle the Troll, the Saurus Street series), a child psychologist in his adopted home town of Hobart, was hooked on the psychological thrillers of Stephen King in his early teens. ”The physiological fear response is very similar to the physiological response you get when you’re excited,” Falk says. ”The rapidly beating heart, the tingling in the fingers … the racing thoughts.”

It’s an enjoyable, temporary state, and a far cry from the heavy, fixed dread he recalls feeling about Roald Dahl’s The Witches at seven or eight. His mental image of the Grand High Witch’s scabby, warty hands – fuelled by Quentin Blake’s vivid illustrations – gave him nightmares. (His own children are unfazed by the book.)

The problem with this sort of fear, Falk says, is that we often fixate on it and try to push it from our minds, which makes matters worse. It is a bad habit to unwittingly teach children.

Master storytellers have always understood the power of fear, and Marsden says irrational fears provide particularly fertile ground for writers. ”Those fears come out of the unconscious mind, which is always more interesting than the conscious mind,” he says. ”They’re not to be dismissed. They’re to be engaged with and possibly even used creatively.”

Marsden likes to ”crank up” fear as much as he can. ”It’s a way of engaging readers and making the book a page-turner.” His plots often place teenagers in perilous situations and explore their responses. ”Fear strips away masks and shows you the real person,” he says.

Scary business: children's author Sonya Hartnett.

Sonya Hartnett (The Children of the King, The Midnight Zoo, Thursday’s Child) also grounds her characters in challenging, unpredictable realities and tests them with desperate situations. ”The children in The Midnight Zoo have lost everything and have nowhere to go. They’re just wandering through war-torn Czechoslovakia lost and alone. That is a fearsome situation for a child to be in but you rely on the fact that children are adaptable. They say, ‘OK, this bad thing has happened but let’s just move on and accept that as the way the world is and deal with it.’ They’re frightened but they’re being tested, made to think … and act … and survive. That’s what a fearsome situation does.

”I grew up in a house where there were occasional moments of real fear, and maybe that somehow affected the way I think about it. I have a respect for toughness and a deep lack of respect for sookiness. That kind of behaviour in anyone – man, woman or child – really repulses me. When you think of Hansel and Gretel, how brave they actually are, and that’s one thing about those stories, the children in them never curl up into weepy little balls. They always act defensively and strongly and bravely.”

Like J.K. Rowling and many other teen authors unafraid to expose their readers to life’s dark complexities, Marsden and Hartnett have been criticised for pushing young readers into territory for which they’re not prepared. ”I get worried when I see people trying to dissuade [children] from their reasonable fears or trying to placate them or comfort them in a meaningless way,” Marsden says. ”It’s as though they’re trying to rob them of their fears, which is not doing them any favours at all.

”Feelings like shame and guilt are given to us for a purpose. They’re there to let us know when we’ve done something that is damaging and is wrong and we need to take steps to remedy it. The reason we have fear is so that we can judge situations and make appropriate responses. So if you take that function away from people, you make them less capable of existing efficiently and effectively in the world.” He says children are excellent self-censors, and simply put down books they find too scary. His youngest child did so recently with the final book in the Harry Potter series.

Hartnett has no time for overprotective adults. ”I certainly have done more than my fair share of having to defend myself against parents, teachers, and all sorts … who go, ‘Oh, what about the children?”’ she says in mock horror. ”When it comes to children, some come attached with idiot parents. There’s going to be a percentage. I have learnt from experience that those sorts of people are not to be reasoned with. You can do nothing for them but to hold them in contempt and their children in pity. I have to say, as I get older, I’m getting angrier,” she says with a laugh. While the notion of what’s scary varies widely from one person to another, some fears – such as of death – are primal and common to readers and authors alike.

DiTerlizzi says death is a theme in many of the books he adored as a child and is revisiting as a parent, including Peter and Wendy and Watership Down. ”I’ve tried to hold on to that when I’ve done the series I’m working on now, The Search for WondLa books,” he says. ”Death is always present in those stories because I think when you’re a kid, at least for me, I was scared to die, I was scared of the people who loved me dying. That’s a huge, very important point in many Grimm’s tales. Many of those start off with the parents dying. Orphans. It’s a primal fear. What would I do if I was left all alone in the world with no one to take care of me?”

His best-selling picture book The Spider and the Fly, based on the 19th-century cautionary poem by Mary Howitt, tackled death head-on, albeit with witty illustrations inspired by black-and-white movies, packed with visual puns to warn readers of impending danger. Some within his publishing company considered it too scary.

”We were just about done, the editor was thrilled, the art director was really happy, I remember there was a kerfuffle … with some of the higher-ups. They were worried that it was too scary,” he says. ”One of the notes we got from on high was, ‘Is it like a show? At the end of the book, can they all come out and take a bow?’ Including the fly. We were like, no! This poem has existed this way for 200 years … That’s the thing people love about this: it’s a warning; it’s the truth. So we kept it.”

DiTerlizzi recently read Charlotte’s Web to his five-year-old daughter, who was untroubled by the constant threat of death to the central character, Wilbur the spring pig. ”She gets that, she understands it, she has no problem with that, but we talk about it.”

And that’s the nub; children’s authors write with the expectation their books will be read to children by parents who can unpack the themes as they go. DiTerlizzi recalls that when he and his siblings had outgrown being read to, his mum read their favourite books independently, so she could keep talking with them about the literature they loved. ”These conversations then led to other conversations about life,” he says.

Many authors are parents themselves. Some, such as Falk and Marsden (a teacher and the founder-principal of his own school in Victoria), bring with them insights into children’s development from their other careers. But when they sit down to write, they’re thinking like artists, not parents or educators. Wild says many of her picture books are born of a haunting idea she can’t shake.

Hartnett writes to entertain a younger version of herself. ”I write to the child that I was, that fairly brave, independent, questing kind of child that I was. The child who had the freedom in the ’70s to roam around the streets and be free and disappear for hours at a time and not come home to find the police had been called.” She describes a kind of unspoken pact between herself and her readers. If they trust her enough to traverse the complex, layered terrain she creates, she’ll provide a satisfying resolution with plenty of room for interpretation. Her promise is simple: ”I will never do anything that is going to make you feel ripped off.”

Wild agrees that a satisfying – as opposed to neat – resolution is crucial. But she concedes some of her young readers prefer clear-cut answers. Fans of Fox, her luminous, haunting tale of friendship, jealously and loneliness, frequently quiz her on whether Fox gets punished or Magpie makes it home. ”Some children write me very gruesome endings for Fox, and what happened to him or what should have happened to him,” she says. ”Children often like things clear-cut but I don’t necessarily want that, and I’m writing the story for myself. I’m hopeful that more thoughtful readers will see that they can come to their own conclusions.”

For parents unsure how to discuss fear with their kids, it’s important to resist the urge to make everything all right by assuring them witches with red, scabby hands don’t really exist. That won’t help next time when it’s monsters under the bed they’re worried about. It is better to help them understand and manage their fears. That means discussing what they’re afraid of, and why. In time, they can delve deeper into whether a fear is rational or irrational. Crucially, says Falk, children need to know that everyone experiences fear, and that it’s one of many feelings that come and go.

”When you’re reading a book and it’s scary, you could choose to turn that book over and put it down,” Falk says. ”It’s the same with a thought. You don’t have to, when that thought comes into your head, stop everything and pay attention to it and try and get rid of it. You can actually carry on with whatever you were doing and just let that image or thought stay there. It’s about giving them the coping skills to be able to do that, so they no longer have to get rid of the thought or image. They don’t have to like it, but they also know it’s not going to do them any harm.”