In 1812, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm published the first edition of their Kinder- und Hausmärchen and were almost immediately criticized for writing stories unsuitable for children. After the first edition of the collection was published, the Grimms were criticized for writing stories that were unsuitable for children. This is worth sitting with for a moment, because the Grimms believed they were doing the opposite: preserving folk material that had belonged to children and families for generations. The outrage, it turns out, was not new then and has not stopped since. Every few decades the argument resets, and adults line up on both sides of the question of whether children ought to be scared by the things they read. I find myself, on a quiet Sunday with coffee going cold beside the keyboard, firmly on one side of that argument.
Where the tradition actually starts
The anxiety about frightening children is almost as old as children's books themselves. In 1658, Johann Amos Comenius published his Orbis Pictus, illustrated with woodcuts of everyday objects, and his work is considered the first picture book for children. Even by then, the material reaching young ears through oral tradition was considerably darker than any illustrated primer. The original Grimm tales are the famous example. In the early 19th-century version published by the German brothers Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm, the wicked queen in Snow White wants to devour the girl's lungs and liver. Even after the Brothers Grimm sanitized the tales across later editions, they did not totally eliminate the scary elements, because fairy tales were intended not just to entertain children, but also to educate them about the consequences of evil deeds.
The key word there is educate. Nobody who has read the original Hansel and Gretel lightly. Inspired by the Great European Famine of the 14th century, the story begins with parents abandoning their children in the woods because they don't have enough food to survive. That is not an abstraction or a symbol; it is the actual terror of actual children in an actual century of hunger, encoded into story so it could travel. Dark material in children's literature has almost always carried this kind of freight. The scary thing is rarely purely decorative. It is there because something real and frightening needed a shape.
Bruno Bettelheim and the useful nightmare
The most sustained intellectual defense of fear in children's literature came from psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim in his 1976 book The Uses of Enchantment. Bettelheim argued that fairy tales help children solve existential problems such as separation anxiety, oedipal conflict, and sibling rivalries, and that the extreme violence and ugly emotions of many fairy tales serve to deflect what may well be going on in the child's mind anyway, because a child's unrealistic fears often require unrealistic hopes.
That last phrase is the one I keep returning to when I'm drafting a scene and wondering whether I've gone too far into strange territory. Unrealistic fears require unrealistic hopes. The fairy tale, Bettelheim wrote, takes existential anxieties and dilemmas very seriously and addresses itself directly to them, including the need to be loved, the fear that one is thought worthless, the love of life, and the fear of death, and it offers solutions in ways that the child can grasp on his level of understanding. The corollary, which Bettelheim stated plainly, is that modern stories written for young children often studiously avoid the existential problems that are critical issues for all of us, and reading becomes devalued when what one has learned to read adds nothing of importance to one's life.
That is a pointed thing to say about a lot of contemporary picture books, and I say it with some sympathy for the writers who produce them. Cheerful is easier to sell at the gift shop. But Bettelheim's challenge is one worth taking seriously at the drafting stage, before the fear gets smoothed away in revision.
Maurice Sendak's grammar of danger
Nobody in the 20th century did more to argue the case with actual books than Maurice Sendak. His seminal 1963 work, Where the Wild Things Are, threw down a challenge to an industry for which children's books with dark themes were frowned upon. The book was criticized by parents and withheld from libraries for being "too dark," but it went on to win the Caldecott Medal for children's literature in 1964 and became a beloved classic.
Sendak remained a subversive figure in children's literature from the 1960s onward, due mainly to his exploration of darker themes, his unsettling illustrations, and depictions of children being wild, rambunctious, imaginative, and amoral. What made the resistance so interesting, and so telling, is where it came from. The aversion to Sendak's works came from adults much more than it did from children. Adults tended to view Sendak's works as too dark and frightening for children, whereas children themselves were enthralled by them.
Sendak understood something about the child reader that protective adults were reluctant to admit. As critic Gregory Maguire put it, what Sendak contributed was "a child's grammar of narrative and image sturdy enough to convey the anxiety and adventure, the danger and potential reward of the mortal world, a grammar that can be deciphered by a child too young to read." That grammar is the thing. Not the scare for its own sake. The full emotional range, including the part that tightens the chest.
Like many great children's book writers before him, Sendak was writing nightmares, not dreams, and the children's books that rehearse and access children's deepest fears or anxieties engage them and fascinate them on a whole different level than those that merely entertain or please them. That observation, from Slate's 2012 appreciation of Sendak's work, is as close to a manifesto as the genre has produced.
Alvin Schwartz and the folklore route
If Sendak made the case through pictures, Alvin Schwartz made it through research. Schwartz published more than 50 books over three decades, many focused on folklore, and with Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark he continued that tradition, scouring university libraries, speaking to professors, and listening to ghost stories in cities, barn lofts, and Boy Scout camps across the country. The three-volume Scary Stories series, published between 1981 and 1991 by Harper and Row and illustrated in the original editions by Stephen Gammell, became one of the most challenged books in American libraries and also one of the most read.
Many of the children's books and films categorized as "scary" are among those most widely read by children and young adults, and there is a long history of adult horror being domesticated by children's literature and culture, with authors and screenwriters turning that which was once utterly horrifying into safe, funny, and delightful books and films. Schwartz worked the opposite direction: he went back to the raw, pre-domesticated material and handed it to children more or less intact, trusting that they could take it. They could. They checked the books out of school libraries in enormous numbers, often while the books were sitting on banned lists.
What this means when you sit down to make one
So what does the tradition actually tell us, practically, when the blank page is open and the coffee is still hot? A few things I've worked out, and keep working out.
- Fear needs to be earned by the story, not borrowed from genre. The Grimm tale about Hansel and Gretel is frightening because hunger and abandonment are real. A picture book that puts a monster on the cover without giving it genuine stakes is borrowing fear it hasn't earned. The feeling comes from the situation, not the creature.
- The child protagonist has to be capable. Sendak's books often show children overcoming evil forces and complex situations; many of his stories are about a child trying to survive while facing difficult emotions such as fear. The fear is real, but so is the child's capacity to move through it. A book that simply frightens and leaves the reader there has skipped the second half of the job.
- The adult's discomfort is not a reliable editorial guide. The instinct to protect children from things that will frighten or disturb them is not entirely unfounded, but children will experience fear and loneliness in their lives even without experiencing such emotions through literature. If the scene scares a grown-up editor but feels right for the child reader you have in mind, trust the child reader. This is harder than it sounds. It requires knowing, concretely, who you are writing for.
- The illustration carries more than the text in these moments. Sendak's moody, dense cross-hatching communicated something that no line of prose could reach. Gammell's original Scary Stories drawings, which were so disturbing that a 2011 reprint replaced them entirely, were doing work the text alone could not do. Dark picture books live and die in the space between word and image, and that space requires a particular kind of trust between the writer and the illustrator.
- Strange is not the same as scary. Some of the most usefully unsettling books for children are barely frightening at all; they are simply odd, slightly off, lit from an unexpected angle. That quality, the eldritch quality, is available to picture books in a way it is not always available to chapter books, because the image can carry strangeness without explaining it. A sentence has to commit to meaning. A picture can just sit there being peculiar, and let the reader do the rest.
A note on the word eldritch
It is a good word and I use it deliberately. It comes from Old English, related to the word for otherworldly or uncanny, and it describes exactly the register that the best dark children's books occupy: not horror in the adult genre sense, not gore, not shock, but the low-frequency hum of something that is slightly not right. The "giddily terrified welcome we have given to our monsters since our earliest days" is what the scholars of horror in children's literature, including Jessica R. McCort in the 2016 collection Reading in the Dark, are actually mapping. Giddily terrified. That is the phrase. It names the feeling correctly: the pleasure is inseparable from the fright.
Children know this already. They have always known it. The challenge for anyone making picture books is to match them where they are, which is somewhere more complicated than we tend to assume when we are sitting in the comfortable chair on the other side of the reading lamp.
The tradition is long. The monsters are well-established. The only question is whether we are willing to let them into the room.
Sources
- Bettelheim, Bruno. The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales. Knopf, 1976.
- McCort, Jessica R., ed. Reading in the Dark: Horror in Children's Literature and Culture. University Press of Mississippi, 2016.
- Schwartz, Alvin. Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. Harper and Row, 1981. Smithsonian Magazine, October 27, 2021: "Why 'Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark' Frightened So Many Parents in the 1990s."
- Slate, May 8, 2012: "Maurice Sendak Knew How To Terrify Children."
- Lozier, Annalise. "Maurice Sendak, and Why Children Need Darkness." Medium, 2020.
- History.com: "The Dark Side of the Grimm Fairy Tales." Last updated May 2025.
- Piqosity: "The History of Children's Literature." January 2026.
Hero image: photo by Shiromani Kant on Unsplash.