5 Unnecessarily Horrifying Childrens’ Books

I’m a clerk at the library, and a large part of my job is to check in, check out, and search for library books. As such, I have seen some doozies when it comes to absolutely nightmarish books. (Plug for my Instagram, which mainly features creepy book covers, goes here.) These are my most recent top five.

5.) Creepy Pair of Underwear! by Aaron Reynolds, illustrated by Peter Brown

Jasper the rabbit buys a pair of underwear that turns out to be both sentient and not amenable to the idea of being disposed of for being scary. Underwear should not have a face.

After Jasper takes the hideous creature off, it reappears on him in the morning.

When he throws it away, it materializes in his drawer. He sends it to China, and it comes back with stereotypical mementos from the trip.

This time, Jasper has had it. He destroys the disconcerting but very much alive being and uses its remains as confetti.

Once he’s finally rid of it, Jasper decides that he doesn’t like the dark and buys a shitload of the creepy underwear. The underwears are happy, “because they had finally found somebody who wasn’t scared.” Gee, why would anyone be afraid of immortal underclothes that pursue you relentlessly?

4.) Pinkalicious and the Cupcake Calamity, written and illustrated by Victoria Kann

I first came across this book when I saw it on a first grade reading list and got it for my daughter to practice reading. You may consider this one a bit of a cheat, since it’s not technically horrifying, but I was shocked by the unpunished bratty behavior of the protagonist.

Pinkalicious is strolling along looking for a treat and notices a crowd gathered around Mr. Swizzle’s Cupcake-Create-O-Matic, which will make a personalized cupcake for a dollar. Never mind the line of kids who were there first, this little asshole shoves her way to the front, shouting “Me first!”

The kid puts in her money and pushes the button, but nothing happens. She immediately gets impatient. ” ‘Bake!’ I said, pressing again.” The entire crowd is getting upset, but none is so important as Pinkalicious, who declares, “I couldn’t wait that long. I wanted a pink cupcake!” She goes around to the back of the ‘matic and climbs inside. She sticks her gross kid hands into the batter to taste it, and then she touches all the cupcake wrappers because she wants them to be polka dotted.

Realizing that the issue is that the batter is not being poured, she pulls a random switch. The whole machine implodes, but at least she gets her bloody pink cupcake–a giant one, and despite it being full of gears and Pinkalicious germs, the other kids shove their unwashed kid mitts in, too.

After destroying his new business venture, Pinkalicious gives a half-assed apology: ” ‘Sorry about your machine,’ I told Mr. Swizzle. ‘That’s okay, Pinkalicious,’ he said. ‘From now on, I’ll stick to ice cream and leave the cupcakes to you!’ ” That’s it, the end. She faces no repercussions whatsoever. She’s not learning a lesson about acting like an entitled jerk–the central conflict of the book is that she wants a cupcake and can’t have it instantly.

3.) Mr. Nogginbody Gets a Hammer, written and illustrated by David Shannon

Okay, first of all, as his name suggests, his stomach is also his face, which is home to his mouth and beady, soulless eyes. And his tie is his nose.

Mr. Nogginbody stumbles across a nail sticking out of his floor, and his TV instructs him to go to the hardware store. Once there, the man from the TV, whose eyes are buttons, like an evil character in Coraline, helpfully gives him a hammer. After pounding his thumb, Noggy manages to flatten the nail into the floor.

In his joy at fixing the problem, he whacks all sorts of things with his tool. Spying a bent-up nail, Mr. N observes, “Hmm…that doesn’t look like a nail. [Upon seeing a flower] But this does!” he screams, shadily hiding the weapon behind his back before pouncing. He then goes on a smashing spree, destroying things and declaring them fixed.

Mr. N remarks about a hole-dwelling rodent, “Wow, these nails are too fast to fix!”

After a head injury, he realizes that not everything is a nail, and decides that “Maybe I can’t fix everything with a hammer.” Serial murders narrowly avoided.

2.) If You Cry Like a Fountain, written and illustrated by Noemi Vola

The author goes into explicit detail on how crying is essential, but only if done correctly: “Hey! We can’t start the book like this, with that sad face. You need to smile, at least at the beginning. Otherwise, everyone will think that you’re sad, and they’ll worry.”

Your emotions make people uncomfortable, so repress them! The worm in the picture proceeds to cry so vehemently that the narrator warns, “If you don’t stop, you’ll drown!”

Backtracking, the narrator asserts, “What I meant is that there are so many reasons for crying, but you have to cry better.” The narrator then offers absolutely disgusting platitudes about the usefulness of tears: “If you feel sad around lunchtime, turn on the stove and cry until the pot is filled. When the tears start to boil, stir in the pasta. You won’t even need to add salt!” There’s an unsettling amount of uses that involve ingesting or becoming completely immersed in tears.

There are also nonsequiturs like “Without crying, frogs would explode”, or “Crying helps pears grow.” Unfortunately, those pears, which had been living creatures, have been mashed up and made into jam and are now dead. Hopefully, they’re dead?

The narrator supplies a fact that in this case I am very thankful for: “Books always end, just like everything else.” However, there’s this ellipsed (ellipsisied?) addendum, which I think is meant to be comforting: “But there’s never an end to tears…”

1.) Stone Fox by John Reynolds Gardiner, illustrated by Marcia Sewall.

This is a book I grew up with as a child. The trauma. The trauma. Rereading it as an adult, it’s even worse than I remembered. It concerns little Willy, a ten-year-old boy living on a Wyoming farm with his grandfather and steadfast dog Searchlight in the somewhat-distant-past. All of a sudden, little Willy’s grandfather experiences debilitating depression: “One day Grandfather wouldn’t get out of bed. He just lay there and stared at the ceiling and looked sad. At first little Willy thought he was playing […] Like the time Grandfather dressed up as the scarecrow out in the garden. It took little Willy an hour to catch on. Boy, did they laugh. Grandfather laughed so hard he cried. And when he cried his beard filled up with tears”. (Just…what? Even descriptions of their happy times makes my skin crawl.) The town doctor is useless: “Doc Smith took a deep breath. And then she began, ‘It happens when a person gives up. Gives up on life. For whatever reason. Starts up here in the mind first; then it spreads to the body. It’s a real sickness, all right. And there’s no cure, except in the person’s own mind. I’m sorry, child, but it appears that your grandfather just doesn’t want to live anymore”.

Little Willy, ever optimistic, replies, ” ‘I’ll find out what’s wrong and make it better. You’ll see. I’ll make Grandfather want to live again’ ” (11). According to the narrator, “A ten-year-old boy cannot run a farm. But you can’t tell a ten-year-old boy that” (12). Therefore Willy is forced to run an entire farm with only the help of Searchlight. And since his grandfather is basically in a coma, I guess little Willy is bathing, feeding, and changing him too?

It’s harvest season, and Willy decides that his grandfather is upset that the harvest will fail, so he and Searchlight plow by themselves. “And the harvest was a big one–close to two hundred bushels per acre. And each bushel weighed around sixty pounds”. ” ‘We made it, Grandfather,’ little Willy said, as tears of happiness rolled down his cheeks. ‘See?’ Little Willy held up two handfuls of money. ‘You can stop worrying. You can get better now.’ Grandfather put his hand down on the bed. Palm down meant ‘no’ “. Now it’s winter, and Willy is chopping wood and stocking up on food. He has to ride a sled five miles to school and then run errands. Willy discovers that his grandfather owes a fuckton in back taxes, and realizes that’s what he’s so upset about when a city slicker waving a derringer shows up demanding $500. Apparently Grandfather has just been hucking the threatening letters from the government in a box for a decade. So Willy puts on a suit and goes to the bank to ask for a loan. The loan officer suggests he sell the farm, but instead Willy invests his college money to enter a sled race with the convenient prize of $500. Stone Fox, an indigenous guy who never loses, because he’s racing to raise money to get his relatives off the reservation they were forced onto, hits Willy in the face for trying to pet his dogs, so Willy is now competing one-eyed against Stone Fox and almost a dozen other dudes who are also very competent at racing. By the way, Searchlight is ten years old. And so is little Willy! This kid is fucking ten! So then this happens: “Searchlight gave it everything she had. She was a hundred feet from the finish line when her heart burst. She died instantly. There was no suffering […] The sled and little Willy tumbled over her, slid along the snow for a while, then came to a stop about ten feet from the finish line” (77-78). Stone Fox, bailing on the race after witnessing the first white person who’s having a shittier day than him, threatens to shoot anyone that passes Willy. “Stone Fox nodded to the boy. The town looked on in silence as little Willy, carrying Searchlight, walked the last ten feet and across the finish line” (81). Are you happy now, Grandfather? Are you happy? I hope so, but we don’t know for sure because the book (and this article) abruptly ends with little Willy mourning his dead dog!

Works Cited

Gardiner, John Reynolds. Stone Fox. New York: Harper & Row, 1980.

Kann, Victoria. Pinkalicious and the Cupcake Calamity. New York: HarperCollins, 2013.

Reynolds, Aaron. Creepy Pair of Underwear! New York: Simon and Schuster, 2017.

Shannon, David. Mr. Nogginbody Gets a Hammer. New York: Norton Young Readers, 2019.

Vola, Noemi. If You Cry Like a Fountain. Canada: Tundra Books, 2022.