wot childrens books still haunt your imagination

[Pestario]

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]

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...

[nochexxx]

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

i hope you would love it now!

[STN]

The Borribles.

[Mr. Tea]

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]

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]

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]

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.

[Lichen]

The Borribles.

...great covers!

The Weirdstone of Brisinagmanen
The Silver Sword

[Dunninger]

The Borribles.

Yes! I love them. I reread the books not too long ago and they are still great. If anybody has recommendations for books in a similar direction, I'd like to hear them.

[Mr. Tea]

Brambly Hedge!

These books are just about the most lovely and gentle thing ever created. I almost feel like I want to have kids purely so I can read these books to them.

[Slothrop]

The Weirdstone of Brisinagmanen

Not sure - re-read this quite recently and it was kind of disappointingly generic fantasy, most of the concepts reheated from Tolkein. Dark is Rising series and Earthsea books much better for that sort of thing imo.

Swallows and Amazons was ace, and is only enhanced when you subsequently realize that a) the books still read well and plausibly, and are actually quite socially conscious (Coot Club / The Big Six in particular - with the sense that the author's aware that there's social distance between the boat builders' kids and the doctors' and lawyers' kids, but the kids themselves don't really care and get on with it) and b) Ransome was friendly with Trotsky.

[Dr Awesome]

Chilling apocalyptic fantasy tale for children aged 3-5.

[baboon2004]

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.

Yeah, computer games are rich in this kind of thing, although I played Myth on a Spectrum emulator a few months ago (that game being my view of the apotheosis of gaming as a kid) and it held up quite well really.

I'm desperately trying to remember haunting books I read when young....I must have just suppressed them all, which explains a lot of things.

[subvert47]

Not sure - re-read this quite recently and it was kind of disappointingly generic fantasy, most of the concepts reheated from Tolkein.

Not really from Tolkien, more Welsh and Irish myth. For instance, the Morrigan (more-ian) comes in numerous Irish stories; and The Owl Service is basically a rewriting of part of the Mabinogian.

It's been a while since I read the Weirdstone, but the bits underground are powerfully done as I remember (and far more claustrophobic than the related parts of Tolkien).

The main fault with Garner I always found was that the stories end in such a rush, leaving you feeling a bit unsatisfied.