wot childrens books still haunt your imagination

nochexxx

harco pronting
Graham Oakleys Magical Changes

this book still haunts my dreams. anyone else come across it?

"It allows the reader to create 512 different surreal pictures by mixing the top and bottom half of pages (even the original pictures are really strange). The illustrations are extremely detailed and delightful, and could be enjoyed by Primary/Elementary school-aged and up."

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routes

we can delay.ay.ay...
i vaguely remember some cartoon where the bad guys were these plantmachines... one had a chainsaw thing... that shit was scary...
 

Loki

Well-known member
The Green Knowe books.... creepy for no clear reason

A Castle of Bone... something very odd about this that I can't remember... it's the 'A' in the title that throws me... 'The' I could have coped with... best freaky cupboard story ever... fuck you Narnia...

Sponge, X and Y - a surreal tale of fish troubleshooters...

Leon Garfield esp Black Jack...

The Boy With The Bronze Axe

Alan Garner, of course

I Am The Cheese - utterly perplexing and confusing then, still a little weird now... and of course Cormier also wrote The Chocolate War and countless other very close to the bear / bare bones children's stories.... with complex psychosexuals and all kinds of nasty spins...
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Thirded (or whatever we're up to now) on Watership Down, book and film both.

The only bit I remember from Rosemary Sutcliffe's The Eagle of the Ninth is a scene of some kind of religious ritual witnessed by an AWOL Roman soldier in a chambered burial mound in second-century Scotland. Awesome stuff.

If we're allowed adverts...the "Mister Soft" Trebor softmints ad:


Of course I was too young to realise at the time that this is quite transparently a visual representation of being on ketamine. And to think they showed this to kids! :eek:
 
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luka

Well-known member
the silver sword....watership down is deep
jayce and the wheeled warriors is amazing
 

woops

is not like other people
I Am The Cheese - utterly perplexing and confusing then, still a little weird now... and of course Cormier also wrote The Chocolate War and countless other very close to the bear / bare bones children's stories.... with complex psychosexuals and all kinds of nasty spins...

Yeah very nasty, teenagers being properly cruel to each other, I could dig it.
 

Pestario

tell your friends
Graham Oakleys Magical Changes

this book still haunts my dreams. anyone else come across it?

"It allows the reader to create 512 different surreal pictures by mixing the top and bottom half of pages (even the original pictures are really strange). The illustrations are extremely detailed and delightful, and could be enjoyed by Primary/Elementary school-aged and up."

that book looks great, I would have loved that as a kid

Lambert, a Disney short about a lion raised by sheep, had a scene where Lambert's adoptive sheep mother is dragged away by a wolf all the while screaming while the wolf salivates on her leg. Disturbing for a kid.
 

Loki

Well-known member
that book looks great, I would have loved that as a kid

maybe for a different thread but... can you tell what you'd have liked as a kid? I'm not sure i can... i have some idea of what I was like but I'm not convinced it's particularly accurate... in fact, i think i liked many more things than i can now remember... i've got a suspicion i only remember the things that i still like now...
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Oh god, I just remembered this incredibly macabre book of "children's" fairy-tales I had as a kid, full of all sorts of dark shit like Cindarella's ugly stepsisters mutilating their feet to try and fit the glass slipper, and the slipper filling with blood...all illustrated with these beautiful paintings. The original Hans Christian Anderson stories are pretty dark too, think I may have had a book of those as well.

Pretty much anything by Roald Dahl deserves a shout here, of course.
 

Pestario

tell your friends
i hope you would love it now!

I'd still love it now, but not in the same way as only a kid can. You know, sitting cross-legged on my bedroom floor, whispering stories to myself about the different pictures, taking the book to school to show my friends only to stuff it back in my bag to hide it from prying eyes...that sort of thing. Rather than talking about it on the internet like I am now
 

PeteUM

It's all grist
This will probably sound a bit vague but a couple of years ago at my Mum's house I found a book that I'd read many times as a kid but it took me a little while to kind of tune in to the memory of doing so but then suddenly I got this real weird flash on it, so to speak. It was just a simple little 70s paperback with pictures about some kid who goes back in time to a prehistoric era and has encounters with dinosaurs and stuff - very sparse and, don't want to say it but hauntological in that stark 70s oddness sense. Anyway as I say I had this real feeling of being transported back to the emotional charge of reading the book at the time. Oddly for me, although I'm sure this is a commonplace thing with memory, the physical book/story that I had rediscovered didn't seem to have much to do with the memory. For a while I even wondered whether the book had accompanied a TV series, because what I recalled seemed so vivid, rich and atmospheric, and nothing to do with this amatuerishly illustrated, thin half-narrative. Thinking about it now kind of makes me wonder if those kind of factors were making my imagination fill in the gaps, like...uh...prodding some kind of ontological dread at the thought of fetching up in a prehistoric swamp. I mean, even now when I think about the crosshatching on the dinosaurs I'm like "wooooah...".
 

grizzleb

Well-known member
This will probably sound a bit vague but a couple of years ago at my Mum's house I found a book that I'd read many times as a kid but it took me a little while to kind of tune in to the memory of doing so but then suddenly I got this real weird flash on it, so to speak. It was just a simple little 70s paperback with pictures about some kid who goes back in time to a prehistoric era and has encounters with dinosaurs and stuff - very sparse and, don't want to say it but hauntological in that stark 70s oddness sense. Anyway as I say I had this real feeling of being transported back to the emotional charge of reading the book at the time. Oddly for me, although I'm sure this is a commonplace thing with memory, the physical book/story that I had rediscovered didn't seem to have much to do with the memory. For a while I even wondered whether the book had accompanied a TV series, because what I recalled seemed so vivid, rich and atmospheric, and nothing to do with this amatuerishly illustrated, thin half-narrative. Thinking about it now kind of makes me wonder if those kind of factors were making my imagination fill in the gaps, like...uh...prodding some kind of ontological dread at the thought of fetching up in a prehistoric swamp. I mean, even now when I think about the crosshatching on the dinosaurs I'm like "wooooah...".
I like it, yeah I know exactly what you mean regarding the disparity between the richness of emotion that you can recall and the completely lacking physical thing. Infact I experienced exactly the same thing when I stumbled across a youtube video of 'World of Illusion' - a game for the sega megadrive with Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck. I watched the first couple of levels and it looked so shitty and basic, and yet I remember being 6 or 7 and being amazed by it and the expansive world it implied. I hadn't seen it since then but I was immediately there.
 
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