Children's Books that Are Just Too Creepy

As if it weren't hard enough growing up in America, the land of free expression at any cost. I mean, sometimes the things people will do, the lengths they will go to get published as a children's book author are just amazing. But some writers seem to want to go just a few clicks past creepy with some of these books.

I thought children's books were supposed to educate and inform children in a non-threatening and un-creepy manner. Apparently I was mistaken because someone actually wrote and published books for kids that tell them things that really only their own parents or families should be telling them. Where do we as a society draw the line and say enough is enough?

When I was growing up, I can remember books like Where the Wild Things Are, and that one was creepy enough for a kid growing up in the 1960's watching Walter Cronkite report on the Vietnam war every night at dinner-time. Nuclear war was an ominous possibility, or so they told us when we did our monthly duck-and-cover drills or toured the basement of our elementary school where 300 people could live, eat, and survive for several weeks.

Children's books used to be where values were taught and anything could happen, well within reason. Grimm's fairy tales were pretty creepy, I guess. I mean that guy Rumpelstiltskin did eat children after all. Did our parents think that was too creepy for us? And what about Rapunzel? Growing hair long enough and string enough to actually throw it down and have a gentleman caller come up for tea was weird, but I don't think it was creepy.

As terrifying as those times were, we all seemed to come through it just fine, not too paranoid or fearful. Besides, as we all got older and began to advance in school, the "monsters" transformed into bullies, then into college exams, and finally into huge balloon mortgage loan payments that would creep into your dreams and force you awake in a cold sweat. But we all learned to handle the monsters, right?

Well, I thought I could handle the monsters until I saw some of the books on this Creepiest Children's Book's Ever list. Some of these books are just so out-dated that their meanings have come to mean something totally different, and some are actually useful, if you have a child with that particular problem. But a walking piece of excrement with red plaid pants and a beret - well, that's where I draw the line.