wot childrens books still haunt your imagination

michael

Bring out the vacuum
Came here to put that when I saw the thread title. Mickey In The Night Kitchen, I think. His suit of dough!

I have a tat of Mickey in his dough plane on one shoulder. Most people can't figure out wtf it is... Still pretty obsessed with that and Where The Wild Things Are.
 

PeteUM

It's all grist
I have a tat of Mickey in his dough plane on one shoulder. Most people can't figure out wtf it is... Still pretty obsessed with that and Where The Wild Things Are.

Very dreamlike...uh... sensual book.

mickey1235846311.jpg



nightkitchen1.jpg


Crikey. I don't really have a thing for tattoos but if I met a woman with one of those I'd be like a one-eyed cat in a seafood store.
 

dave

the day today tonight
As far as Sendak goes Outside Over There is the scariest. There's a bit where some goblins creep into a girl's bedroom, turn her baby sister into ice and steal her. The ice baby looks horrid. Good fun reading that to preschoolers.

If it sounds familiar that's because your parents also read you scary books when you were small. Or maybe you saw the movie Labyrinth which was kinda based off it.

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.
I didn't know those book when I was little but we have one now and my boys love it. Wilfred is cool.
 

subvert47

I don't fight, I run away
The bit in Weirdstone where they're trying to get through the horribly narrow tunnels is fantastic (as well as totally playing up to my slightly claustrophobic side) but the orc-things and the elf and all that sort of stuff seems very very tolkein-esque.

Just re-read it, along with The Moon Of Gomrath. I thought they were both pretty good – though, as I remembered, they end in too much of a rush. And yes, the stuff in the little tunnels is as scary as ever. You can feel yourself heading for a total shitfunk panic just reading it.
 

craner

Beast of Burden
Owliver by Robert Krauss, all Richard Scarrey's books particularly The Great Pie Robbery, plus a Benjamin book about a tragic Baptist teddy bear who was locked up with a toy elephant and had to make paper wings to fly to his chapel. These were all formative, but a bit disturbing.
 

yyaldrin

in je ogen waait de wind
yes it's called funnybones in english. there's also a television show based on it. i somehow never forgot about it. i think it's because all of the stories play at night. pitch-black sky, clear with no clouds and with bright yellow stars. as a child you don't really experience the night because you sleep a lot and run and jump around during the day so whatever happens at night belongs to the realm of the imagination. funnybones cleverly fills that void.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Wasn't really worth remembering. Funny the power these things hold over your imagination when you're a kid though.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
33000
as a child you don't really experience the night because you sleep a lot and run and jump around during the day so whatever happens at night belongs to the realm of the imagination. funnybones cleverly fills that void.
Yeah that's a big part of things such as Tom's Midnight Garden, The Midnight Folk and so on.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Or broader... many children's stories have an escape into a secret world which is not accessible by adults or their acquaintances, this could occur just at night (probably at midnight) or in a wardrobe, or via a tollbooth or down a rabbit hole or by being blown to another land by a twister. Normally the child is unhappy and is facing mundane but (seemingly) insurmountable problems in the real world, then they go to the magic land and face potentially much more serious and life-threatening issues that, with the help of their new friends and possibly some mixture of favourable sorcery and destiny they overcome. And ultimately they go back to the drab real world, where, they are suddenly able to defeat their real-world foes with the skills they learned in the fairy-tale land.
I used to love those sorts of stories as kids. I think I would go to say that nothing in my adult life ever has or will give me as much pleasure as some of the sheer mindblowing excitement I got from the Neverending Story or The Enchanted Castle or whatever. Although having your knob sucked while smoking heroin is pretty good.
 
Last edited:

IdleRich

IdleRich
The last line was a cheap joke which should be ignored and not distract from the rest of the above which I meant quite seriously.
 
Top