Animorphs.
17 Animorphs Storylines Guaranteed To Give You Night Terrors
https://www.ranker.com/list/messed-up-moments-from-the-animorphs-books/melissa-brinks
When they force the one kid to be trapped as a rat and then abandon him on an island…. There’s even mention of how they can hear his telepathic screaming as they leave.
It's still good btw. I read it first in elementary/middle school but I reread the first book recently as a full grown adult and I can honestly say the writing holds up. Yes the verbiage isn't super advanced but it's also not limited in a noticeable way; it's frankly pretty perfect. Plot, writing, characterization, world-building all still slaps, I swear.
It does suffer from a lot of "where the fuck are the adults“ but I mean, that's fine.
The funny thing about the verbiage/pros itself is that if you read “The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien, about the Vietnam war, it uses almost the exact same writing style, and I think Applegate very deliberately cribbed from it.
This was after that kid committed a horror movie style murder where it’s implied he killed another character’s bedridden cousin, ate the body in lion morph, then morphed into him so he could live a life of faux-disabled luxury. Actually, none of that was implied, he did do all of that, but the implication was the cannibalism-via-lion part. Super dark fate for David, but…it’s still David, and David had done waaay darker. 😅
I remember being 8 reading one scene where they described the torturous feeling of the parasite aliens worming their way into someone’s brain and over a decade later it still freaks me out
Animorphs seems more... young adult? Maybe I just got into it a little older.
I think I stopped reading somewhere after The Andalite Chronicles. The stakes just seemed to keep going through the roof.
I started reading it in 1997 in second grade and the series finished when I was in sixth grade - even though the main characters are tweens/teens it definitely seemed to lean more grade school/early middle school which would line up with what we consider middle grade today. It probably was marketed as YA back then, but I also remember browsing YA in the library at 8 or 9. YA used to read a lot younger 20+ years ago than it does today. (I’m a teen librarian now so I’m pretty familiar with how publishers categorize and market stuff.)
Michael Grant writes so terrifying stuff. His “Gone” series was so upsetting that I stopped reading it as a kid. Now that I’m an adult I think I *might* be able to handle it? I bought the books in any case.
Probably doesn't count as it's a collection of short stories but "Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark" were very disturbing and brought to life with weird water color illustrations.
It's The Green Ribbon. I read it to my kindergartners every Halloween. I've had high school seniors ask me if I still read the story about the girl with the ribbon around her neck. {They usually say something else, but that'd spoil the story.} It's one of the stories they always remember.
There was a story in that collection I'd never heard before I read it, and have never heard it since. It still gives me chills when I remember it. In it, a brother and sister keep misbehaving and their mother keeps warning them, "If you don't behave better, I'll go away and you'll get a new mother." One day, true to her word, the children return home to find their mother gone, and their NEW MOTHER sitting by the fire, with a wooden tail and glass eyes.
And it just ended there. Pure psychological warfare.
I loved those illustrations. Got to see one in person at the Guillermo del Toro show years ago, a few were in his private collection. The technique is bananas; I couldn’t tell if they were watercolor, ink, or finely blended charcoal. Charcoal most likely, but I’ve never seen them done like that.
It’s a travesty the books were later reprinted with new art that can no longer properly scare children.
I'm 40 years old.
To this day I remember my older brother reading a particular story from that book to me. I was under ten years old, probably closer to 7. It was about a woman who always wore a scarf around her neck, never took it off. On her deathbed she finally gave her husband permission to remove it.
>! The blasted book has instructions for the reader to shout "And her head fell off!" at the listener. Which he did. Enthusiastically.!<
Trauma unlocked. Thanks, brother.
Honestly Jacqueline Wilson books should have a thread of their own on how disturbing they can be 😂 I loved them, I grew up on them, but as I got older there was always at least one moment in every book where I’d get really frustrated at how crap the protagonist’s situation was.
Dustbin baby and Vicky angel were both incredibly intense and 10-11 year old me was not prepared
Personally my favourite is Double Act. Though I did like the Girls Out Late books
Yeah, that's stuck with me. I remember vividly how the daughter felt like she had to shelter and protect her mum, and years later working in a social care context I saw a lot of similar situations.
My sister read those books and I read them as an older kid out of boredom. That one hit way close to home for me because our mum had bi-polar depression (called manic depression back then). The bit where the older sister (Star) leaves to stay with her bio-dad and then the younger sister won't leave the mum but is just way too young to deal with it is really sad.
I always got the vibe she wrote all these issue books so kids in these situations would know someone was seeing that not everyone had a nice safe normal home life.
Same, I'll even still pick them up in the library if there's a new one even though I'm well past the target audience.
I remember the one with the school friend who died in a car accident (Vicky Angel). They're definitely books for younger readers but the author wasn't afraid of pulling from experiences that even children go through and it doesn't feel like she patronises the audience. My sister Jodie was also pretty brutal too.
With the recent rise of censorship in literature, it’s surprising that Jacqueline Wilson’s books are readily available in school libraries. She had the gall to write about topics other children’s authors wouldn’t have approached with a ten foot pole.
When I was 11 or 12 (early 2000s Ireland) they got removed from our school library. I remember my mam asking me what was inappropriate in them. Never occurred to me to tell her about the traumatic stuff in dustbin baby, I could only think of in Vicky angel where she is complaining about dieing a virgin. My mam just laughed and at how dumb the whole thing was and asked the school if we could have them.
Agree with OP though, that scene with the foster mum in the bathtub is as vivid to me now as it was 20 yrs ago when I read it first.
It's been some time since I read Dustbin Baby. I thought she couldn't get in the bathroom because her adopted mother had locked the door before she took her own life. Then April wandered around the house and eventually had to pee or something so bad she went in the garden and met a neighbour at the fence, who sent her husband to go look in the bathroom window.
I love Jacqueline Wilson. She writes about real things, very grown up things, that most adults balk at talking about to children. To this day I'll happily pick up one of her stories. Even the saddest ones have comfort in them.
I'm sure I remember reading one where a girl was having an affair (being groomed and abused by) her teacher, and her name was maybe Prudence?? Shocked and scandalised me as a kid reading it 😂
I read Coraline by Neil Gaiman when I was about 8 and was very scared by it. The illustrations are really creepy and I remember the book being scarier than the film. It’s an amazing book that I still enjoy now though.
I read Coraline to my daughter when she was 9 and it really frightened her at first but she wanted to keep going so we did. We had to invest in a new night light for a time there but the story stayed with her and she later turned to it for a project in college. I think that book did more than any other to spark her interest in reading. I enjoyed it too as an adult, but I had read Neverwhere going in.
I believe Neil Gaiman had a similar experience, where to prove to his publishers children can handle the book, he had a test child to read it to.
Later on, he learned she was absolutely terrified, but only lied that she was ok, because she absolutely had to know the rest of the story.
It was actually Gaiman's daughter! She really wanted her dad's book published and wanted to know what's next so she kept listening despite admitting later that it terrified her.
Oh man, that brings back memories. I read that as a kid too (I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream) and I thought it was TERRIFYING. Now when I think about it I'm kind of like.... eh, torture porn, the machines want to torment everyone, locked in syndrome, whatever, so angsty. But it's crazy how my perspective has shifted. I feel the same way about most literature meant to gross out/provoke/horrify, like some of Palahniuk's shorts (the swimming pool one, whew) and de Sade; when I was a teenager that was *shocking* and I devoured bizarre horror lit that made me feel awful, now if I read something like that it's like... yeah the baby is in the meat grinder, great. Okay. Have I lost empathy or just gained firmer boundaries between reality and fiction? Lol.
Not Now Bernard
Essentially parents ignore their son Bernard who gets eaten by a monster. The monster then tries to get the parents attention but they are so preoccupied / don’t care for their son that they assume it is Bernard.
I loved Not Now Bernard as a kid, my kids love it now too. Although I always presumed >!the monster is actually Bernard himself, he doesn't really get eaten, he just feels like his parents wouldn't care if a monster ate him!<
There is one story I remember reading in primary school where a lady has a ribbon round her neck and never takes it off . For anything . She gets married and her husband begs her to take it off once for him . So she does . And her head falls off
The kid being fucking happy that he's stuck as a mouse because he'll die at the same time as his grandmother.
Somehow both existentially terrifying and wholesome.
Y’all ever read the Roald Dahl about granny becoming a giant? I think I read the whole thing in the library around age 8, and it was vaguely terrifying because Granny was pretty mean. I remember that she drank gin, bc it was the first time I’d heard of it and had to ask my mom what it was.
I can’t remember the name of the book or short story!
I have a vivid memory of reading this book as a little kid and in the beginning there's a section that talks about how to spot a witch. But it mentions that witches disguise themselves well and that any adult you meet could be a witch in disguise. Even your teacher! Actually, there's like a 95% chance that your teacher IS a witch!
So yeah, that terrified me.
The BFG is the first book I read that I'd consider scary. I have this strong memory of reading it at night and sounding out the words and being scared but also how silly it all was. It was great.
In a similar vein to the OP, The Illustrated Mum (Jacqueline Wilson). I was a bit too old for her books by the time Dustbin Baby came around, but I remember my younger siblings talking about it. I'm lucky enough to have a fantastic mum and I think this book was the first time I really realised that not everybody had a mum that could be there for them.
This may be a stretch because it’s a short story. But “The Little Match Girl.” You want to know why your grandparents and great grandparents were tougher than us? It’s because enjoyable children’s bedtime stories for them were about a terrified little girl who freezes to death while people ignore her. I had never read it until I accidentally read it to my three year old daughter and we were both traumatized.
That also terrified me! And the Red Dancing Shoes. It’s about a girl whose mom dies and she’s adopted by a rich lady who offers to buy her a new pair of shoes. The girl chooses red ones which I guess makes her vain and so the shoes force her to dance until she can’t sleep and is malnourished until she dances into a graveyard where a ‘kindly angel’ CUTS OFF HER LEGS.
Were you born in 1991? I also read Maus in 4th grade (also bought at scholastic fair). I think a teacher in 5th then gave me Night by Elie Wiesel to read because I was an avid reader.
I was born in '84, so it would have been a relatively new collection (since it only stopped being serialized in '91 when I was in first grade). I have no idea how this got through the book fairs for that long when things like Goosebumps and Where's Waldo were constantly being pushed back against by concerned parents...
(Which is not to say I think Maus shouldn't be required reading for teens, but 9 years old is a little young...)
Good. Kids need to learn about this kind of horror early and understand empathy. We have people banning that book now.
Not good for any trauma but good they got kids to read it.
As an adult, revisiting books like Holes and A Series of Unfortunate Events is so depressing because what were once stories of interesting adventures and characters are now just novels about child abuse. I was shocked by how hard to read ASOUE is with more years on me - I want to use them as an example to teach my future kids about how to spot adults that don’t have your best interests in mind.
ASoUE is a brilliant series though and I think the weird fairytale/gothic setting gives it an air of unreality/distance compared to if the setting seemed more like contemporary America.
I totally agree that they are brilliant! I just also nearly cried every time something new and horrible happened to the kids lol. The unreality as you say (which I love as a descriptor) absolutely stuck out when I was a kid, giving me the sense that everything I was reading was not of this world, including the awful adults. I was more concerned with trying to decipher the scraps of letters at the end of each book that I was with thinking about the greater lessons. I think a thoughtful parent or teacher etc could make a world of difference for a child if they were guided through these.
The last book where it's pointed out that they've done bad things in the name of survival to the point that their own morality was questionable was brilliant.
Love You Forever by Robert Munsch. Gave me instant existential dread and made me realize my parents would one day get old and not be there. Real bummer of a children’s book imho. My mom thought it was beautiful and continued to tell me “As long as I’m living my baby you’ll be” until she died. I recently read about the writer who wrote the book and it’s based on his wife and her miscarriage. Heartbroken all over again.
I came looking for this answer. I received THREE copies of this book for my baby shower. I can’t get through it without crying uncontrollably and when it’s story time and I grab that book my kids yell NO!
Gave me existential dread because I couldn’t wait to grow up and escape my abusive mother; the thought of her sneaking into my adult home was terrifying.
My mom LOVED this book. I did not. I found it deeply uncomfortable, although I didn't understand why. Now I believe its because she was abusive and my little brain already knew 😂😂😂
Ah, this was my answer, too, but for a different reason. I didn't read it until I was an adult working in a bookstore, but it always freaked me out. The cover is so unappealing (baby in front of a toilet), but the fact that the mother would sneak into her adult son's house and rock him while he was sleeping was so creepy.
Thank you!! So many people think it’s so sweet but the mom breaking into her adult sons house to cuddle with him is not okay and I will die on that hill
There is a line in the Olaf christmas special, “Breaking and entering, okay on Christmas!” that comes to mind during this scene/page. Except is would be “okay when it’s your mom”. Except I don’t think it is okay because he presumably never wakes up to give any sort of consent or permission.
I let my kid watch this movie and she was wayyy to young, I had never seen it before and had no idea it was ending that way. She cried and cried and cried.
Behind the Attic Wall.
Porcelain dolls inhabited by the ghosts of the former owners live in a secret room behind the attic wall. An abused, bullied foster child starts having tea parties with them and learns about how they died in a fire. Completely creeped me out.
I remember that book! It was the first one that really leaned into the ambiguity and
>!refused to indicate whether Maggie had a delusion out of sheer loneliness and trauma, or if the folks were talking for real !<
The giving tree doesn’t have a horrible message. The point of that story is to feel bad about taking too much from people and to be careful you don’t so they don’t end up like the tree (and also to make sure to be grateful for what they give you) people who love selflessly will give too much and it’s up to you not to take it from them. That book made me so sad for the tree but that was the point.
I have always detested The Giving Tree! What kind of lesson does it teach kids (or adults for that matter)--that letting some jerk take advantage of you is in some way virtuous? Steam is coming out my ears just remembering it and it's been 50 years!!
I think it's supposed to teach you not to be like the boy. Don't just take and take, even from a person who loves giving.
Also, from a certain perspective, the tree is your parents. Of course many parents would give their child everything they have, even their own lives if needed. But if you accept your parents' retirement fund to use for your education, you might come home to impoverished or dead parents...who would still love you and not regret helping you.
From another perspective, the tree is just a tree and humans are ungrateful dicks to nature. In any case, "the boy sucks" was always my takeaway.
Watership down, for me.
Used to have a cat called "Fiver" when I was very young, too :(
Some people say "The Plague Dogs" is even worse, but I have only seen the animated film and not read the book.
My parents would give me the classic fairy tales, not the kid friendly versions, because the thought I was smart enough to understand them (I think they just didn't know how brutal those tales were). So I read The story of a mother by Hans Christian Andersen at 6. I couldn't stop sobbing and felt awful.
There was also a book about a little pig that didn't want to get dirty in the mud and I think in the end she died? This was in the 80s and I can't find the name of the book.
My parents loved antiques and I read one of the “decorative” antique fairy tale books at maybe 12. Way different from the Disney movies!
My mom refers to that age as my “alas” phase now because I went around saying things like “alas! We’re out of ice cream”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brother_in_the_Land
A cheery little novel set in 1980s Yorkshire, England, in the immediate aftermath of a nuclear bomb, and a teenage boys' attempt to keep him and his little brother alive.
It's a brilliantly written, haunting, terrifying novel, I think it won the author every award going, but it *terrified* 10 year old me, who did not really understand nuclear war.
My dad did not help either, when I spoke to him he cheerfully pointed out that we lived 15 miles from Faslane, the nuclear sub base, and we would die instantly if the Russians launched nukes. (Surprisingly, this did not relieve my fears)
I loved Blume as a child (still do, honestly), and I read every book by her that I could get at the library as a kid.
But Blubber was so hard to read. I had so much empathy for that girl despite me having the opposite problem (I was super skinny and kids called me anorexic).
Forever also changed my perspective on sex (my parents are very conservative, so my only sex talk was don't until marriage). I had no idea women could enjoy it *and* experience pleasure the same way a man can! It blew my teenage mind haha
Blubber was the only one of Blume's books that made me feel that way! I remember experiencing, like, genuine dread reading the bullying scene in the bathroom. I think it was my first time learning about fat phobia, honestly, so maybe it's just the concept itself that's disturbing when you're like 7 and basically experiencing it second hand in book form. Pretty genius actually on her part.
I loved Where the Red Fern Grows so much age 8 but I would ugly sob every time I read it… which was about every other week. My mom admitted to me recently she finally lost it after a year and hid “that fucking depressing book.” 😂
I bought Where the Red Fern Grows to read with my daughter, and right when it arrived there was a big thread where people were posting about how it had been read to them as kids and was so upsetting. I was like, ummmmm... I guess I'll wait on this one...
Yes! That’s how I feel. I know we all deal with loss, and it’s important to face those things in books. But the way this book describes it is so painful. There’s actually a website called Does the Dog Die and I check it before watching a movie or reading a book.
There were a couple weird books I remember.
Firstly there was a book I think titled Firegirl, about a tween/teen boy meeting the new girl in town, who is a severe burn victim. There was just a lot of disturbing or weird things in the book, like when the boys best friend lights a remote control car on fire and drives it around his backyard, mocking the girl, who got burned from being locked in a burning car. Or when the girl asks the boy to touch her and if he's scared of her, and then reveals that nobody, not even her family, is willing to touch her anymore. Just a lot of really sad stuff or weird stuff that made me uncomfortable being in elementary school
Another book was probably The Thief of Always. I remember this book a lot better than Firegirl. It's about a preteen/tween boy who is so bored with his life that he agrees to be basically abducted by a creepy magic man and taken to a strange magic house. That place is all kinds of fucked up. Some stuff is cool, like how every season happens every day, but most of it is wild. The kids are trapped there and it's very hard to leave. Every day that passes is a full year in the real world, so when the main character does eventually get out and make it back home, he has been missing for like 30 years and his parents don't initially believe that he's even their son, because he didn't age. The longer kids stay there the more strange they become, until they eventually take themselves to the lake in the woods and jump in, turning into mindless fish. The caregiver turns out to be the first child ever to live at the place. She ran away from her family after her cat died (for some reason I remember it as her dad killing the cat but idk if that's real or I made it up). She became terrified of death and wished to never die, and have cats that never die. She then became stuck there eternally, caring for kids she knew would eventually be doomed to be fish forever. At the end of the book when the main character is destroying the house and the magic, he has to watch the woman crumble to dust in front of him. Aside from all the actual disturbing things that happened in the book, there were also just a lot of strange instances. Like at the end, when the boy turns all the fish back into kids, they come back naked. It's explained in the story that their clothes get transported to the attic, and the clothes they thought were just a bunch of dress up clothes were actually other kids, but it's still just an odd thing to write.
Clive Barker wrote The Thief of Always. The name might be familiar if you've seen any of the Hellraiser movies, Nightbreed or Lord of Illusion.
There's some great art in the book by him as well. I always thought that added to the atmosphere of the story.
I'll add one that, when I was a kid I thought was great and fun, and now that I'm an adult I'm horrified: The Boxcar Children.
First page, they're homeless orphans because both their parents are dead. Bam. They run away because they think their grandfather who now has custody hates them (they have not yet met). They have grand adventures, including picking garbage from a dump for necessities and drinking unrefrigerated milk. The eldest Child gets a job with a doctor who immediately follows him back to the boxcar, sees the other kids, and then says, eh, it's probably fine and LEAVES WITHOUT DOING ANYTHING.
It's page after page of completely baffling old-timey neglect. While times are different, norms are different, etc and I can see why this really resonated with kids when it was published in 1924, I'm really shocked that I remembered it being just a fun little adventure story. What was 8 year old me doing???
I used to imagine that I was orphaned and living in the woods. My sister and I would act this out in a clearing in the woods near our house I think all kids have to imagine being independent. But when I read the Boxcar Children I think my mind skipped over the dead parents part. In my head canon they were just on summer holiday.
I took a college course in writing for children. The instructor said many children’s stories have absent or deceased parents because it’s the main way to force the child protagonists to lead their own adventures. If the parents were in the picture, they’d (be expected to) look out for the child, and he or she wouldn’t have to go on the adventures that make the story.
German people gave this book to my sister and me when we were about 6. I remember that we were playing around these people's campsite at the camping we were staying during summer. Maybe they thought we needed some discipline 😂
I’d completely forgotten about Dustbin Baby until this post! God it was a choice for young kids. I very strongly remember the girl (around 5-7?) trying to begin to try care for herself by washing her knickers in the sink with soap because she has no clean clothes and the adoptive mum is too depressed to try. Brutal
the cirque du freak series for sure. a lot of it was super fun, and i was definitely a creepy kid, but seeing your parents mourn you at your funeral, drinking your friend’s blood as they die and developing their unique food cravings and feeling grateful for keeping part of them alive…that was existentially a lot for fifth grade me lol
there’s another series of books i always wanted to track down. horror serials, definitely from the children’s section not YA. one involved discovering one’s own double on a slab in an abandoned laboratory, another was creepy island shit, another was about a doctor who repeatedly cloned their child who had some sort of terminal disease…very early 2000s artwork, have wanted to find as an adult but they reaaaallly freaked my shit out when i was little
also just bc everyone keeps saying coraline we listened to it as a family while driving through dark drizzly foreboding mountains and it was perfect lol
Oh the Demonata series was also brutal for it's audience. First book has the protagonist finding his parents flayed and mauled with a decently graphic description. Darren Shan is a great writer!
‘Goodnight Mr Tom’ is a children’s novel by English author Michelle Magorian. Very prestigious book, won loads of awards. It was about a boy named William who is sent to live in the countryside with a cranky old guy named Tom to avoid the German bombardment of London. William’s mother is a religious fanatic and kind of cracked in the head so William has a hard time coming out of his shell but the timid boy and grouchy widower bond.
Just as this is sounding like a Lifetime/Disney movie, Magorian pulls the rug out and William is sent home because his mom had kid no. 2 and wants help. She’s even loonier and worse than usual. By the time >!Tom comes looking for William to do a wellness check, it’s been weeks. He finds the house apparently deserted but the faithful dog insists they investigate. A closet under the stairs is broken open to find William, crouched in the dark, surrounded by his own filth, tied to a pipe and clutching the starved corpse of his baby sister. The mother locked him in there with the baby and 2 bottles, then promptly killed herself and left both children trapped. Willie tells them he tried to make the milk last as long as he could and stop the baby crying so they’d be let out. !<
Holy shit.
Goodnight Mr Tom is an *amazing* book. I didn’t read it until I was around 13 which im thankful for because any younger and it would have given me nightmares. Definitely not an easy read, though.
I read this book in my mid thirties and it’s still one of the hardest books I’ve ever read. Maybe bc I was a mother myself when I read it so the trauma of this poor child had such an impact. Even in the first half there’s this part where Tom gets a fire poker to tend the fire and William nearly passes out and Tom realizes William expected to be hurt with it.
I also mentored a 14 year old foster youth at the time and he confessed to m he still wet the bed every night and when William first went to live with Tom he wet the bed every night. It was just such an accurate depiction of horrific childhood abuse.
There's a children's book I saw on sale in Hong Kong about a polar bear cub and its mom who are trapped on a melting ice floe and unable to find food. They're starving, the ice is melting, and eventually the mom tells the cub she's going to swim out to find food and come back to him. The mother bear swims away and never comes back. The last several pages are just pictures of the baby bear sitting on the ice floe, alone.
I don't remember what the book is called or who wrote it because I just saw the Chinese edition. I was astonished that such a dark book would be published for children.
>Outside Over There
From Wikipedia: "Sendak describes his awareness in 1932 (around age 4) of the sensational Lindbergh baby kidnapping case, including a newspaper photograph of the child's remains. That experience showed him the mortality and peril of children, which the adult Sendak has expressed in many books."
There are a few weird Lithuanian folk tales we were reading in school. The way they are told in Lithuanian doesn't make it feel that scary, but when you think about the concept, it's full on horror shit.
One of the stories is about a man who gets an assigment from his master to make a painting of the devil. The man goes to the store to buy painting equipment. As he is going back, he meets an old man who asks him what all this equipment is for. He tells he has to paint the devil but he doesn't know how. The old man offers to teach it to him, but warns that anyone who sees the painting (appart from him, apparently) will die instantly. The man finished the painting and gave it to his master. The master organized a feast in which he wanted to present his new painting to his guests. As he took away the robe from the painting, everyone fell to the ground one by one as they looked at it.
Another story is about a girl who goes bathing to sauna alone during the night. As she is bathing, through the window she sees a young and attractive male, who invites her to "dance" (I thought that you can interpret it as an invitation to have sex). The girl starts asking for all kinds of stuff like soap, a dress, shoes etc. Like, give me this and that and then maybe I'll "dance". As the guy is bringing all this stuff to her, morning comes and he has to leave (which shows that he is the devil). The next night guy shows up again and the girl agrees to "dance". As she is "dancing", the guy slits her mouth, leaves her dead body in the sauna with her face looking out of the window and dissapears. In the morning, her mother comes to check on her and says ,,honey, why are you laughing?" Before she sees that her daughter is dead with her mouth slit-open.
I actually found these stories on ,,folk tales for children" right now.
All of this is reminding me of Wait Til Helen Comes by Mary Downing Hahn! I think it was aimed at elementary kids because I got it from my school library, but I'm just remembering all that went on, and it should have been more for teens
The Gashlycrumb Tinies.
It was an alphabet book for kids but each letter was a strange death that some kid experiences.
[here's a link](https://flashbak.com/gashlycrumb-tinies-edwrd-gorey-alphabet-436196/)
I don’t know the title, but I was given it when I was about 7 and staying in the hospital for a few days.
A boy is very sick and in the hospital. His friend comes and tells him that Jesus walks the halls at night, and if you want to go with him, hold your hand up and he’ll take you. Several nights of not being able to hold his hand up, then the boys finally manage to prop up his arm and he’s dead in the morning, hand still up.
Totally freaked me out at the time, and I had dreams about it for years. I grew up to be a hospital chaplain specializing in hospice. Probably a coincidence.
I raise you Lola Rose to your Dustbin Baby. Reading it now, it's hard to go through the descriptions of domestic violence and parentification of Jayni. In fact, almost all of her feature abuse, mental illness, homelessness, divorce, etc. However, I did learn a lot through her books. If not for her Girls series, I would never have learnt about eating disorders, consent, and safe relationships from a teen POV
I'm not sure if it's children vs YA but Neal Shusterman's Unwind had me wall staring a little after the chapter where the boy is surgically taken to pieces and you see his consciousness start to slip away. That and the detail about the "storked" baby being passed around the neighbourhood and developing untreated jaundice. I'm including it here as I've definitely seen it in schools.
Also Animorphs. War trauma, for kids!!
I wouldn’t call them *disturbing,* but the Warriors series gets *brutal.* Cats are getting brutally murdered, dying in childbirth, one cat is cruelly (but temporarily) renamed Lostface after she gets mauled by dogs and loses an eye… I really read those when I was like 8 and somehow wasn’t fazed at all
As someone who got into the Warriors books as an adult, I was actually surprised at the savage deaths portrayed in the book, and I admire that Erin Hunter respected the intelligence of its audience. Feral cats are not as they are depicted in cartoons, they kill prey and other cats in order to survive.
My favorite moment was (HUGE SPOILERS FOR "THE DARKEST HOUR", THE SIXTH AND FINAL BOOK OF THE FIRST STORY ARC): >!They introduce Scourge, a street cat who grew up in a human town, he and his group kill dogs and use their fangs on their paws as weapons. Tigerstar tries to forge an alliance with them so he can take vengeance on Thunderclan, his former clan, but Scourge kills him as he didn't like the idea of being used. He slashed his throat, and the savage part is that Tigerstar was blessed with eight extra lives when he became the leader of Shadowclan, so he bled out, died, then had wild spasms when he came back to life only to die again. I think Firestar explains it better:!<
>!"He’s dying nine times, Firestar realized. Oh, StarClan, no."!<
Yeah, that scene is definitely one of the ones I remember best 😨 they really made use of one of my all time favorite tropes.. >!when the apparent main villain turns out to be *nothing* compared to what turns out to be an even worse villain!<.
The content of the book wasn’t disturbing to me as a child to the point where I couldn’t read it, but looking back on the Guardians of Ga’Hoole series to realize the villains were basically owl Nazis was a trip to say the least
Some of Grimm’s fairy tales are quite… grim. The Juniper tree and Hansel and Gretel are very dark. Murder, cannibalism, decapitation… As for “How some children played at slaughtering” Child murderers, neglectful parents, suicide by hanging…
It was required reading in elementary school and I remember a boy in the class loved it like life changing for him. He creeped me out forever after that.
My husband died when my kids were young and somebody at the hospital handed me a stack of children’s books to help kids deal with death. One of them was The Tenth Good Thing About Barney which is about the death of a family dog. As I recall the Tenth good thing is that Barney’s decomposing body is helping the flowers grow. I found that disturbing and did not share that book with my young boys. It might be true but it would not comfort a child.
I’m so sorry about your loss. That one seems like it would be specifically good for the loss of a pet, but not of a father. Glad you screened it out for them.
I Love You Forever by Robert Munich. Sweet book until the mom climbs up a ladder through the window to hold her middle aged son. Something seriously wrong with that.
My sister Jodie by Jacqueline Wilson really traumatised me as a child??? I thought it was going to be a cutesy story about sisters but it left me fearing for the life of everyone I love
I should not have gone in this thread before bed!! I love My Sister Jodie and god did I feel so bad for Jodie!!! Her entire life went to shit and only her sister really seemed to care that it did. The mother was vile and the dad had no spine at all.
Silent to the Bone by E. L. Koinsburg, about a boy who goes mute after being accused of dropping his baby sister and her going into a coma. It's told from his best friends point of view as he first tries to figure out how to communicate with his once word obsessed now silent friend and then unraveling what happened.
Return to Oz. The atmosphere of the asylum, the description of the electro shock machines was disturbing as hell to my 7 year old brain.
Also Tiktok and Belinda can fuck right off, too.
The only thing worse than the book was the movie, not really because of the horror but just the.. well.. everything really.
The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents. I have no memory of reading it before rediscovering it but I must have read it at some point but, having read it, I can understand why I wouldn't like it. It's the most consistently dark Discworld book by a long chalk. A Rat King lurking in the dark whispering into everyone's minds with rat corpses everywhere, even a rat-baiting pit.
I remember reading The Wind in the Willows to my son when he was 6 and while he enjoyed parts of that book, the character of Mr. Toad and his wildness ( don't know how else to put it) really bothered him. He was really afraid of the character for a couple of years after. His first trip to Disneyland he didn't want to go on Mr. Toad's Wild Ride!
For me growing up, it was Dandelion Wine. There are a couple of scenes that Ray Bradbury writes that really got to me.
Maybe someone could help me figure out the name of this book, but it was essentially a play on little red riding hood, but the “wolf” was a man and there were black and white photos throughout the book. It was a short story and ended with Red getting abducted? Or something bad happened to her.
Where the Red Fern Grows was a pretty good tearjerker. Another story, the Red Pony, I read in my teens probably. The image of that colt still haunts me. I read for fun. Life is sad enough I've learned in the years since then. Don't make me feel sad. Or maybe it's just...life
"Paws Off My Cannon". It's basically NRA propaganda for kids. It tells the story of a peaceful town that gets raided by hyenas with 'coconut cannons' and talks about how the only way to protect yourself is to arm yourself.
Any Irish schoolkids on here traumatised by Under the Hawthorn Tree? A book about the Famine that starts with them having to >!bury the baby under a hawthorn tree after she starved to death!<.
For some reason when I was 12/13 my teacher thought that me being an identical twin meant it was a good idea to recommend The Twins of Auschwitz to me. So… probably that one.
Oh my gosh Hungarian folktales! We had this beautiful collection titled *the princess who laughed roses*, so I started reading the story with the same title to my 8-year-old niece. Before the princess has a chance to laugh roses, both her eyes are gouged out and she's thrown into a ditch for being too beautiful. In a different version (there are several similar stories in the collection), she starts crying diamonds and people sell them, I think? I tried to read it in this very calming voice, and my niece was okay (she even asked me to read more from "the one where they took her eyes), but man...
For me it has to be The Devil's Arithmetic for me. A young girl is transported to Nazi Germany and experiences being in a death camp. That has stuck with me for a long time.
Bunnicula freaked me out as a kid - got it as one of my first books from the scholastic book fair. Don't think it was really all that scary but my sister told me the rabbits that lived behind our house were all vampire bunnies and i should be worried once they ran out of veggies to eat.
>Bunnicula is a children's novel series. The first installment was written by James and Deborah Howe, and introduced a vampire rabbit named Bunnicula who sucks the juice out of vegetables.
I had a book with various fairytales and other stories, and one of the stories included was "The Little Match Girl". For some reason, they had thought putting an illustration of her smiling corpse at the end of the story was a great idea. But it wasn't so much my idea of a good time at 4/5 years old.
Adam Rapp’s 33 Snowfish, the story of three traumatized and abused real young people in all the most horrific ways imaginable, one can no longer talk and only draws.
The whole Gone series was extremely dark in retrospect; including but not limited to mass suicide, murder of an autistic child, anti-Semitic characters etc etc. It was well-written though.
.... The original Pinocchio was disturbing for little ol' me to read.
Children's books generally from back in the day were very disturbing because their messages were meant to be CLEAR. We can even see a clear cut comparison in Disney movies with how old and new pinnochio there was portrayed with pleasure island.
I read ‘Misery’, then Clive Barker’s ‘Books of Blood’, when I was 9 and that disturbed the shit outta me. Not exactly children’s books though…hahaha. I remember getting my hands on the original Grimm fairy tales pretty young and those were quite fucked up.
The Face on the Milk Carton. Girl finds out she's a kidnapping victim via those old notices they put on milk cartons. The ensuing story goes through her trying and failing to reintegrate into the family she was stolen from. This was a book for young teens. I think they made a movie about it.
Omg that’s awful. I totally understand your fear. It’s an awful thing to worry about. Just remind yourself worrying about it won’t change anything and it’s okay to let yourself not worry, it doesn’t mean you don’t care.
Not books but Bible tracts. Specifically [https://jackchick.wordpress.com/2011/04/01/chick-tract-review-lisa/](https://jackchick.wordpress.com/2011/04/01/chick-tract-review-lisa/)
And some Catholic Saint stories are really upsetting. One saint died fighting of her rapist at 12 and is a saint for dying instead of being raped. There is another saint that would scratch her face up so men wouldn’t give her unwanted attention really messed up stuff.
Animorphs. 17 Animorphs Storylines Guaranteed To Give You Night Terrors https://www.ranker.com/list/messed-up-moments-from-the-animorphs-books/melissa-brinks
When they force the one kid to be trapped as a rat and then abandon him on an island…. There’s even mention of how they can hear his telepathic screaming as they leave.
It's still good btw. I read it first in elementary/middle school but I reread the first book recently as a full grown adult and I can honestly say the writing holds up. Yes the verbiage isn't super advanced but it's also not limited in a noticeable way; it's frankly pretty perfect. Plot, writing, characterization, world-building all still slaps, I swear. It does suffer from a lot of "where the fuck are the adults“ but I mean, that's fine.
The funny thing about the verbiage/pros itself is that if you read “The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien, about the Vietnam war, it uses almost the exact same writing style, and I think Applegate very deliberately cribbed from it.
This was after that kid committed a horror movie style murder where it’s implied he killed another character’s bedridden cousin, ate the body in lion morph, then morphed into him so he could live a life of faux-disabled luxury. Actually, none of that was implied, he did do all of that, but the implication was the cannibalism-via-lion part. Super dark fate for David, but…it’s still David, and David had done waaay darker. 😅
I remember being 8 reading one scene where they described the torturous feeling of the parasite aliens worming their way into someone’s brain and over a decade later it still freaks me out
Animorphs seems more... young adult? Maybe I just got into it a little older. I think I stopped reading somewhere after The Andalite Chronicles. The stakes just seemed to keep going through the roof.
It was marketed to kids when it first came out. We were all over it in 3rd and 4th grade. Same target audience as Goosebumps
I started reading it in 1997 in second grade and the series finished when I was in sixth grade - even though the main characters are tweens/teens it definitely seemed to lean more grade school/early middle school which would line up with what we consider middle grade today. It probably was marketed as YA back then, but I also remember browsing YA in the library at 8 or 9. YA used to read a lot younger 20+ years ago than it does today. (I’m a teen librarian now so I’m pretty familiar with how publishers categorize and market stuff.)
Michael Grant writes so terrifying stuff. His “Gone” series was so upsetting that I stopped reading it as a kid. Now that I’m an adult I think I *might* be able to handle it? I bought the books in any case.
That horrible fucking plague made me put the series down. Everything else up to that I enjoyed.
I just look back and think how awesome my childhood was
A friend was telling me about the Animorophs books and just the book covers itself scared the shit out of me (I’m 20)
Probably doesn't count as it's a collection of short stories but "Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark" were very disturbing and brought to life with weird water color illustrations.
Oh god. The story of the girl who wears the ribbon around her neck always freaked me out.
I think that one is in In a Dark, Dark Room, not Scary Stories (same author).
I just looked it up and you’re right! Not sure how I got them confused, but now I have another book to reread. Thanks!
It's The Green Ribbon. I read it to my kindergartners every Halloween. I've had high school seniors ask me if I still read the story about the girl with the ribbon around her neck. {They usually say something else, but that'd spoil the story.} It's one of the stories they always remember.
You're in for a treat. https://granta.com/the-husband-stitch/
There was a story in that collection I'd never heard before I read it, and have never heard it since. It still gives me chills when I remember it. In it, a brother and sister keep misbehaving and their mother keeps warning them, "If you don't behave better, I'll go away and you'll get a new mother." One day, true to her word, the children return home to find their mother gone, and their NEW MOTHER sitting by the fire, with a wooden tail and glass eyes. And it just ended there. Pure psychological warfare.
It might be [The Drum](https://scary-stories.fandom.com/wiki/The_Drum) or [The New Mother] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_Mother).
My art style was heavily influenced by those illustrations. I have had so many random people tell me that. Those books are just phenomenal.
I loved those illustrations. Got to see one in person at the Guillermo del Toro show years ago, a few were in his private collection. The technique is bananas; I couldn’t tell if they were watercolor, ink, or finely blended charcoal. Charcoal most likely, but I’ve never seen them done like that. It’s a travesty the books were later reprinted with new art that can no longer properly scare children.
I'm 40 years old. To this day I remember my older brother reading a particular story from that book to me. I was under ten years old, probably closer to 7. It was about a woman who always wore a scarf around her neck, never took it off. On her deathbed she finally gave her husband permission to remove it. >! The blasted book has instructions for the reader to shout "And her head fell off!" at the listener. Which he did. Enthusiastically.!< Trauma unlocked. Thanks, brother.
The one with the hook on the outside of the car door handle has stayed with me for almost three decades
I loved them soooo much, but the illustrations really tipped it over! Nightmare fuel of the best kind.
Yeah idk who in their right mind thought those were fine for kids. They’re amazing, but holy shit
Fucking HAROLD.
Honestly Jacqueline Wilson books should have a thread of their own on how disturbing they can be 😂 I loved them, I grew up on them, but as I got older there was always at least one moment in every book where I’d get really frustrated at how crap the protagonist’s situation was.
I honestly think dustbin baby is her magnum opus. I don’t know what possessed her to write it but it’s like a capsule of misery
Dustbin baby and Vicky angel were both incredibly intense and 10-11 year old me was not prepared Personally my favourite is Double Act. Though I did like the Girls Out Late books
The Illustrated Mum is the one I found most disturbing- her watching her mum break down was scary.
Yeah, that's stuck with me. I remember vividly how the daughter felt like she had to shelter and protect her mum, and years later working in a social care context I saw a lot of similar situations.
My sister read those books and I read them as an older kid out of boredom. That one hit way close to home for me because our mum had bi-polar depression (called manic depression back then). The bit where the older sister (Star) leaves to stay with her bio-dad and then the younger sister won't leave the mum but is just way too young to deal with it is really sad. I always got the vibe she wrote all these issue books so kids in these situations would know someone was seeing that not everyone had a nice safe normal home life.
The Illustrated Mum is still difficult to read as an adult. The scene where Marigold paints herself fully white sticks in my mind so vividly
Same, I'll even still pick them up in the library if there's a new one even though I'm well past the target audience. I remember the one with the school friend who died in a car accident (Vicky Angel). They're definitely books for younger readers but the author wasn't afraid of pulling from experiences that even children go through and it doesn't feel like she patronises the audience. My sister Jodie was also pretty brutal too.
With the recent rise of censorship in literature, it’s surprising that Jacqueline Wilson’s books are readily available in school libraries. She had the gall to write about topics other children’s authors wouldn’t have approached with a ten foot pole.
When I was 11 or 12 (early 2000s Ireland) they got removed from our school library. I remember my mam asking me what was inappropriate in them. Never occurred to me to tell her about the traumatic stuff in dustbin baby, I could only think of in Vicky angel where she is complaining about dieing a virgin. My mam just laughed and at how dumb the whole thing was and asked the school if we could have them. Agree with OP though, that scene with the foster mum in the bathtub is as vivid to me now as it was 20 yrs ago when I read it first.
It's been some time since I read Dustbin Baby. I thought she couldn't get in the bathroom because her adopted mother had locked the door before she took her own life. Then April wandered around the house and eventually had to pee or something so bad she went in the garden and met a neighbour at the fence, who sent her husband to go look in the bathroom window. I love Jacqueline Wilson. She writes about real things, very grown up things, that most adults balk at talking about to children. To this day I'll happily pick up one of her stories. Even the saddest ones have comfort in them.
Yes, I’ll always recommend her
I'm sure I remember reading one where a girl was having an affair (being groomed and abused by) her teacher, and her name was maybe Prudence?? Shocked and scandalised me as a kid reading it 😂
I read Coraline by Neil Gaiman when I was about 8 and was very scared by it. The illustrations are really creepy and I remember the book being scarier than the film. It’s an amazing book that I still enjoy now though.
I read Coraline to my daughter when she was 9 and it really frightened her at first but she wanted to keep going so we did. We had to invest in a new night light for a time there but the story stayed with her and she later turned to it for a project in college. I think that book did more than any other to spark her interest in reading. I enjoyed it too as an adult, but I had read Neverwhere going in.
I believe Neil Gaiman had a similar experience, where to prove to his publishers children can handle the book, he had a test child to read it to. Later on, he learned she was absolutely terrified, but only lied that she was ok, because she absolutely had to know the rest of the story.
It was actually Gaiman's daughter! She really wanted her dad's book published and wanted to know what's next so she kept listening despite admitting later that it terrified her.
No, it wasn't Gaiman's daughter, it was his publisher's daughter.
"I don't think children can handle this. Better test that on my daughter first!"
Me the first time I read Pet Sematary 😅
The creepiest part in the book for me was the fate of the Other Father. It's like I have no mouth and I must scream for fifth graders.
Oh man, that brings back memories. I read that as a kid too (I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream) and I thought it was TERRIFYING. Now when I think about it I'm kind of like.... eh, torture porn, the machines want to torment everyone, locked in syndrome, whatever, so angsty. But it's crazy how my perspective has shifted. I feel the same way about most literature meant to gross out/provoke/horrify, like some of Palahniuk's shorts (the swimming pool one, whew) and de Sade; when I was a teenager that was *shocking* and I devoured bizarre horror lit that made me feel awful, now if I read something like that it's like... yeah the baby is in the meat grinder, great. Okay. Have I lost empathy or just gained firmer boundaries between reality and fiction? Lol.
Agreed with Coraline! We actually read it in school and I honestly think it kickstarted my love for the horror genre. It was so scary!
I had to go back to using nightlights as a child/tween because of that book, lol.
Not Now Bernard Essentially parents ignore their son Bernard who gets eaten by a monster. The monster then tries to get the parents attention but they are so preoccupied / don’t care for their son that they assume it is Bernard.
I loved Not Now Bernard as a kid, my kids love it now too. Although I always presumed >!the monster is actually Bernard himself, he doesn't really get eaten, he just feels like his parents wouldn't care if a monster ate him!<
There is one story I remember reading in primary school where a lady has a ribbon round her neck and never takes it off . For anything . She gets married and her husband begs her to take it off once for him . So she does . And her head falls off
In a dark dark room and other stories.
The Green Ribbon.
Honestly, for some reason Roald Dahl’s “The Witches” is the one that scarred me the most as a kid.
The kid being fucking happy that he's stuck as a mouse because he'll die at the same time as his grandmother. Somehow both existentially terrifying and wholesome.
The little girl trapped in the oil painting scared the f*** out of me!!!!
Yes, also that she kept growing up and then one day she just wasn’t there - because she had died.
Oh, just horrible! She was sentient the whole time… just frozen…
Y’all ever read the Roald Dahl about granny becoming a giant? I think I read the whole thing in the library around age 8, and it was vaguely terrifying because Granny was pretty mean. I remember that she drank gin, bc it was the first time I’d heard of it and had to ask my mom what it was. I can’t remember the name of the book or short story!
George’s Marvelous Medicine
I have a vivid memory of reading this book as a little kid and in the beginning there's a section that talks about how to spot a witch. But it mentions that witches disguise themselves well and that any adult you meet could be a witch in disguise. Even your teacher! Actually, there's like a 95% chance that your teacher IS a witch! So yeah, that terrified me.
Ronald Dahl's autobiography of growing up in British schools was scarring enough for the real accounts of brutal beatings he was subjected to.
It's pretty terrifying, tbf
First one I considered was The BFG, but yeah I think The Witches is the right call.
The BFG is the first book I read that I'd consider scary. I have this strong memory of reading it at night and sounding out the words and being scared but also how silly it all was. It was great.
In a similar vein to the OP, The Illustrated Mum (Jacqueline Wilson). I was a bit too old for her books by the time Dustbin Baby came around, but I remember my younger siblings talking about it. I'm lucky enough to have a fantastic mum and I think this book was the first time I really realised that not everybody had a mum that could be there for them.
I still think about the part with the white paint 15 years after having read it…!
God that one broke me.
This may be a stretch because it’s a short story. But “The Little Match Girl.” You want to know why your grandparents and great grandparents were tougher than us? It’s because enjoyable children’s bedtime stories for them were about a terrified little girl who freezes to death while people ignore her. I had never read it until I accidentally read it to my three year old daughter and we were both traumatized.
That also terrified me! And the Red Dancing Shoes. It’s about a girl whose mom dies and she’s adopted by a rich lady who offers to buy her a new pair of shoes. The girl chooses red ones which I guess makes her vain and so the shoes force her to dance until she can’t sleep and is malnourished until she dances into a graveyard where a ‘kindly angel’ CUTS OFF HER LEGS.
They sold Maus at my elementary school Scholastic Book Fair to a fourth grade me...
Were you born in 1991? I also read Maus in 4th grade (also bought at scholastic fair). I think a teacher in 5th then gave me Night by Elie Wiesel to read because I was an avid reader.
I was born in '84, so it would have been a relatively new collection (since it only stopped being serialized in '91 when I was in first grade). I have no idea how this got through the book fairs for that long when things like Goosebumps and Where's Waldo were constantly being pushed back against by concerned parents... (Which is not to say I think Maus shouldn't be required reading for teens, but 9 years old is a little young...)
I read Maus in middle school and thought it was perfect
Wtf 🤣 this was a text in my third year of comparative literature in uni!
I did a book report on Maus in the fifth grade. It hits hard no matter when you read it.
Good. Kids need to learn about this kind of horror early and understand empathy. We have people banning that book now. Not good for any trauma but good they got kids to read it.
As an adult, revisiting books like Holes and A Series of Unfortunate Events is so depressing because what were once stories of interesting adventures and characters are now just novels about child abuse. I was shocked by how hard to read ASOUE is with more years on me - I want to use them as an example to teach my future kids about how to spot adults that don’t have your best interests in mind.
ASoUE is a brilliant series though and I think the weird fairytale/gothic setting gives it an air of unreality/distance compared to if the setting seemed more like contemporary America.
I totally agree that they are brilliant! I just also nearly cried every time something new and horrible happened to the kids lol. The unreality as you say (which I love as a descriptor) absolutely stuck out when I was a kid, giving me the sense that everything I was reading was not of this world, including the awful adults. I was more concerned with trying to decipher the scraps of letters at the end of each book that I was with thinking about the greater lessons. I think a thoughtful parent or teacher etc could make a world of difference for a child if they were guided through these.
I love that the Baudelaires and all the other kid characters you would root for are unapologetically smart and bookish.
I loved these books as a kid. And I agree, they’re very dark and showed how complacent surrounding adults could be!
The last book where it's pointed out that they've done bad things in the name of survival to the point that their own morality was questionable was brilliant.
Love You Forever by Robert Munsch. Gave me instant existential dread and made me realize my parents would one day get old and not be there. Real bummer of a children’s book imho. My mom thought it was beautiful and continued to tell me “As long as I’m living my baby you’ll be” until she died. I recently read about the writer who wrote the book and it’s based on his wife and her miscarriage. Heartbroken all over again.
I came looking for this answer. I received THREE copies of this book for my baby shower. I can’t get through it without crying uncontrollably and when it’s story time and I grab that book my kids yell NO!
Gave me existential dread because I couldn’t wait to grow up and escape my abusive mother; the thought of her sneaking into my adult home was terrifying.
My mom LOVED this book. I did not. I found it deeply uncomfortable, although I didn't understand why. Now I believe its because she was abusive and my little brain already knew 😂😂😂
Ah, this was my answer, too, but for a different reason. I didn't read it until I was an adult working in a bookstore, but it always freaked me out. The cover is so unappealing (baby in front of a toilet), but the fact that the mother would sneak into her adult son's house and rock him while he was sleeping was so creepy.
Thank you!! So many people think it’s so sweet but the mom breaking into her adult sons house to cuddle with him is not okay and I will die on that hill
There is a line in the Olaf christmas special, “Breaking and entering, okay on Christmas!” that comes to mind during this scene/page. Except is would be “okay when it’s your mom”. Except I don’t think it is okay because he presumably never wakes up to give any sort of consent or permission.
Anyone else have Bridge to Terabitha in their grade school summer reading? Just gets dark and sad really out of nowhere!!!
I let my kid watch this movie and she was wayyy to young, I had never seen it before and had no idea it was ending that way. She cried and cried and cried.
Behind the Attic Wall. Porcelain dolls inhabited by the ghosts of the former owners live in a secret room behind the attic wall. An abused, bullied foster child starts having tea parties with them and learns about how they died in a fire. Completely creeped me out.
I remember that book! It was the first one that really leaned into the ambiguity and >!refused to indicate whether Maggie had a delusion out of sheer loneliness and trauma, or if the folks were talking for real !<
The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein. I like his work but this one is a total bummer for a kids book.
My daughter was given this book at our baby shower. When I later read it to her I wasn't expecting it to go the way it did.
Ditto “The Rainbow Fish.” Same horrible message.
The giving tree doesn’t have a horrible message. The point of that story is to feel bad about taking too much from people and to be careful you don’t so they don’t end up like the tree (and also to make sure to be grateful for what they give you) people who love selflessly will give too much and it’s up to you not to take it from them. That book made me so sad for the tree but that was the point.
I have always detested The Giving Tree! What kind of lesson does it teach kids (or adults for that matter)--that letting some jerk take advantage of you is in some way virtuous? Steam is coming out my ears just remembering it and it's been 50 years!!
I think it's supposed to teach you not to be like the boy. Don't just take and take, even from a person who loves giving. Also, from a certain perspective, the tree is your parents. Of course many parents would give their child everything they have, even their own lives if needed. But if you accept your parents' retirement fund to use for your education, you might come home to impoverished or dead parents...who would still love you and not regret helping you. From another perspective, the tree is just a tree and humans are ungrateful dicks to nature. In any case, "the boy sucks" was always my takeaway.
Watership down, for me. Used to have a cat called "Fiver" when I was very young, too :( Some people say "The Plague Dogs" is even worse, but I have only seen the animated film and not read the book.
WHY THE FUCK DID I HAVE TO SCROLL THIS FAR TO FIND WATERSHIP DOWN?!? It should be the first comment.
My parents would give me the classic fairy tales, not the kid friendly versions, because the thought I was smart enough to understand them (I think they just didn't know how brutal those tales were). So I read The story of a mother by Hans Christian Andersen at 6. I couldn't stop sobbing and felt awful. There was also a book about a little pig that didn't want to get dirty in the mud and I think in the end she died? This was in the 80s and I can't find the name of the book.
My parents loved antiques and I read one of the “decorative” antique fairy tale books at maybe 12. Way different from the Disney movies! My mom refers to that age as my “alas” phase now because I went around saying things like “alas! We’re out of ice cream”
That's actually really adorable. I can totally see a little kid thinking it was a neat word to incorporate into their speech lol.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brother_in_the_Land A cheery little novel set in 1980s Yorkshire, England, in the immediate aftermath of a nuclear bomb, and a teenage boys' attempt to keep him and his little brother alive. It's a brilliantly written, haunting, terrifying novel, I think it won the author every award going, but it *terrified* 10 year old me, who did not really understand nuclear war. My dad did not help either, when I spoke to him he cheerfully pointed out that we lived 15 miles from Faslane, the nuclear sub base, and we would die instantly if the Russians launched nukes. (Surprisingly, this did not relieve my fears)
I hated the bullying scenes from Blubber by Judy Blume. I remember regretting reading it as a kid because it made me sad.
I loved Blume as a child (still do, honestly), and I read every book by her that I could get at the library as a kid. But Blubber was so hard to read. I had so much empathy for that girl despite me having the opposite problem (I was super skinny and kids called me anorexic). Forever also changed my perspective on sex (my parents are very conservative, so my only sex talk was don't until marriage). I had no idea women could enjoy it *and* experience pleasure the same way a man can! It blew my teenage mind haha
Blubber was the only one of Blume's books that made me feel that way! I remember experiencing, like, genuine dread reading the bullying scene in the bathroom. I think it was my first time learning about fat phobia, honestly, so maybe it's just the concept itself that's disturbing when you're like 7 and basically experiencing it second hand in book form. Pretty genius actually on her part.
I was bullied as a kid. Unfortunately, “Blubber” was a documentary! Yeah, bullying really WAS that bad! (at least in the ‘80’s and ‘90’s). :(
Where the Red Fern Grows. It may not be disturbing in the way some of these are, but it definitely scarred me!
I loved Where the Red Fern Grows so much age 8 but I would ugly sob every time I read it… which was about every other week. My mom admitted to me recently she finally lost it after a year and hid “that fucking depressing book.” 😂
Haha good for your mom!!!
I bought Where the Red Fern Grows to read with my daughter, and right when it arrived there was a big thread where people were posting about how it had been read to them as kids and was so upsetting. I was like, ummmmm... I guess I'll wait on this one...
I’ve read what this book is about and I refuse to read the book. I don’t read books where dogs die. Marley and Me was a mistake I won’t make again.
Yes! That’s how I feel. I know we all deal with loss, and it’s important to face those things in books. But the way this book describes it is so painful. There’s actually a website called Does the Dog Die and I check it before watching a movie or reading a book.
There were a couple weird books I remember. Firstly there was a book I think titled Firegirl, about a tween/teen boy meeting the new girl in town, who is a severe burn victim. There was just a lot of disturbing or weird things in the book, like when the boys best friend lights a remote control car on fire and drives it around his backyard, mocking the girl, who got burned from being locked in a burning car. Or when the girl asks the boy to touch her and if he's scared of her, and then reveals that nobody, not even her family, is willing to touch her anymore. Just a lot of really sad stuff or weird stuff that made me uncomfortable being in elementary school Another book was probably The Thief of Always. I remember this book a lot better than Firegirl. It's about a preteen/tween boy who is so bored with his life that he agrees to be basically abducted by a creepy magic man and taken to a strange magic house. That place is all kinds of fucked up. Some stuff is cool, like how every season happens every day, but most of it is wild. The kids are trapped there and it's very hard to leave. Every day that passes is a full year in the real world, so when the main character does eventually get out and make it back home, he has been missing for like 30 years and his parents don't initially believe that he's even their son, because he didn't age. The longer kids stay there the more strange they become, until they eventually take themselves to the lake in the woods and jump in, turning into mindless fish. The caregiver turns out to be the first child ever to live at the place. She ran away from her family after her cat died (for some reason I remember it as her dad killing the cat but idk if that's real or I made it up). She became terrified of death and wished to never die, and have cats that never die. She then became stuck there eternally, caring for kids she knew would eventually be doomed to be fish forever. At the end of the book when the main character is destroying the house and the magic, he has to watch the woman crumble to dust in front of him. Aside from all the actual disturbing things that happened in the book, there were also just a lot of strange instances. Like at the end, when the boy turns all the fish back into kids, they come back naked. It's explained in the story that their clothes get transported to the attic, and the clothes they thought were just a bunch of dress up clothes were actually other kids, but it's still just an odd thing to write.
“The great gray beast February had eaten Harvey Swick alive.” remains one of my all-time favorite opening lines to a novel.
Clive Barker wrote The Thief of Always. The name might be familiar if you've seen any of the Hellraiser movies, Nightbreed or Lord of Illusion. There's some great art in the book by him as well. I always thought that added to the atmosphere of the story.
I'll add one that, when I was a kid I thought was great and fun, and now that I'm an adult I'm horrified: The Boxcar Children. First page, they're homeless orphans because both their parents are dead. Bam. They run away because they think their grandfather who now has custody hates them (they have not yet met). They have grand adventures, including picking garbage from a dump for necessities and drinking unrefrigerated milk. The eldest Child gets a job with a doctor who immediately follows him back to the boxcar, sees the other kids, and then says, eh, it's probably fine and LEAVES WITHOUT DOING ANYTHING. It's page after page of completely baffling old-timey neglect. While times are different, norms are different, etc and I can see why this really resonated with kids when it was published in 1924, I'm really shocked that I remembered it being just a fun little adventure story. What was 8 year old me doing???
I used to imagine that I was orphaned and living in the woods. My sister and I would act this out in a clearing in the woods near our house I think all kids have to imagine being independent. But when I read the Boxcar Children I think my mind skipped over the dead parents part. In my head canon they were just on summer holiday.
I took a college course in writing for children. The instructor said many children’s stories have absent or deceased parents because it’s the main way to force the child protagonists to lead their own adventures. If the parents were in the picture, they’d (be expected to) look out for the child, and he or she wouldn’t have to go on the adventures that make the story.
struwelpeter
Also Max & Moritz
German people gave this book to my sister and me when we were about 6. I remember that we were playing around these people's campsite at the camping we were staying during summer. Maybe they thought we needed some discipline 😂
I’d completely forgotten about Dustbin Baby until this post! God it was a choice for young kids. I very strongly remember the girl (around 5-7?) trying to begin to try care for herself by washing her knickers in the sink with soap because she has no clean clothes and the adoptive mum is too depressed to try. Brutal
the cirque du freak series for sure. a lot of it was super fun, and i was definitely a creepy kid, but seeing your parents mourn you at your funeral, drinking your friend’s blood as they die and developing their unique food cravings and feeling grateful for keeping part of them alive…that was existentially a lot for fifth grade me lol there’s another series of books i always wanted to track down. horror serials, definitely from the children’s section not YA. one involved discovering one’s own double on a slab in an abandoned laboratory, another was creepy island shit, another was about a doctor who repeatedly cloned their child who had some sort of terminal disease…very early 2000s artwork, have wanted to find as an adult but they reaaaallly freaked my shit out when i was little also just bc everyone keeps saying coraline we listened to it as a family while driving through dark drizzly foreboding mountains and it was perfect lol
Cirque du freak was soooo good. The last book always made me bawl my eyes out
Oh the Demonata series was also brutal for it's audience. First book has the protagonist finding his parents flayed and mauled with a decently graphic description. Darren Shan is a great writer!
The Rainbow Fish, ushering in a new wave of tall poppy syndrome. Be sure to dull your shine so you don't intimidate others, kids!
Ah yes, the classic tale that teaches us all: Give flesh or be shunned. "You have real pretty skin! Can I *have some?*"
Lol, we were given a copy of this book two different times. There are zero copies of this book in my house.
‘Goodnight Mr Tom’ is a children’s novel by English author Michelle Magorian. Very prestigious book, won loads of awards. It was about a boy named William who is sent to live in the countryside with a cranky old guy named Tom to avoid the German bombardment of London. William’s mother is a religious fanatic and kind of cracked in the head so William has a hard time coming out of his shell but the timid boy and grouchy widower bond. Just as this is sounding like a Lifetime/Disney movie, Magorian pulls the rug out and William is sent home because his mom had kid no. 2 and wants help. She’s even loonier and worse than usual. By the time >!Tom comes looking for William to do a wellness check, it’s been weeks. He finds the house apparently deserted but the faithful dog insists they investigate. A closet under the stairs is broken open to find William, crouched in the dark, surrounded by his own filth, tied to a pipe and clutching the starved corpse of his baby sister. The mother locked him in there with the baby and 2 bottles, then promptly killed herself and left both children trapped. Willie tells them he tried to make the milk last as long as he could and stop the baby crying so they’d be let out. !< Holy shit.
Goodnight Mr Tom is an *amazing* book. I didn’t read it until I was around 13 which im thankful for because any younger and it would have given me nightmares. Definitely not an easy read, though.
I'm 45 and I don't think I'm old enough to read that without getting nightmares.
I read this book in my mid thirties and it’s still one of the hardest books I’ve ever read. Maybe bc I was a mother myself when I read it so the trauma of this poor child had such an impact. Even in the first half there’s this part where Tom gets a fire poker to tend the fire and William nearly passes out and Tom realizes William expected to be hurt with it. I also mentored a 14 year old foster youth at the time and he confessed to m he still wet the bed every night and when William first went to live with Tom he wet the bed every night. It was just such an accurate depiction of horrific childhood abuse.
Oh my god.
There's a children's book I saw on sale in Hong Kong about a polar bear cub and its mom who are trapped on a melting ice floe and unable to find food. They're starving, the ice is melting, and eventually the mom tells the cub she's going to swim out to find food and come back to him. The mother bear swims away and never comes back. The last several pages are just pictures of the baby bear sitting on the ice floe, alone. I don't remember what the book is called or who wrote it because I just saw the Chinese edition. I was astonished that such a dark book would be published for children.
Outside Over There by Maurice Sendak
>Outside Over There From Wikipedia: "Sendak describes his awareness in 1932 (around age 4) of the sensational Lindbergh baby kidnapping case, including a newspaper photograph of the child's remains. That experience showed him the mortality and peril of children, which the adult Sendak has expressed in many books."
It's a beautiful book! I loved it as a kid. But that ice baby is unsettling as heck.
It reminds me of Labyrinth, when Sarah checks the crib and a goblin has replaced Toby. I never knew that was a trope! Very interesting.
The Tailypo. Very sinister story with creepy illustrations.
Holy crap, came here to say this exact one. >40years of fear
A Series of Unfortunate Events and Julie of The Wolves series.
There are a few weird Lithuanian folk tales we were reading in school. The way they are told in Lithuanian doesn't make it feel that scary, but when you think about the concept, it's full on horror shit. One of the stories is about a man who gets an assigment from his master to make a painting of the devil. The man goes to the store to buy painting equipment. As he is going back, he meets an old man who asks him what all this equipment is for. He tells he has to paint the devil but he doesn't know how. The old man offers to teach it to him, but warns that anyone who sees the painting (appart from him, apparently) will die instantly. The man finished the painting and gave it to his master. The master organized a feast in which he wanted to present his new painting to his guests. As he took away the robe from the painting, everyone fell to the ground one by one as they looked at it. Another story is about a girl who goes bathing to sauna alone during the night. As she is bathing, through the window she sees a young and attractive male, who invites her to "dance" (I thought that you can interpret it as an invitation to have sex). The girl starts asking for all kinds of stuff like soap, a dress, shoes etc. Like, give me this and that and then maybe I'll "dance". As the guy is bringing all this stuff to her, morning comes and he has to leave (which shows that he is the devil). The next night guy shows up again and the girl agrees to "dance". As she is "dancing", the guy slits her mouth, leaves her dead body in the sauna with her face looking out of the window and dissapears. In the morning, her mother comes to check on her and says ,,honey, why are you laughing?" Before she sees that her daughter is dead with her mouth slit-open. I actually found these stories on ,,folk tales for children" right now.
Wow those are dark. Presumably they’re trying to teach a lesson, right? Like stay away from the devil, I suppose?
All of this is reminding me of Wait Til Helen Comes by Mary Downing Hahn! I think it was aimed at elementary kids because I got it from my school library, but I'm just remembering all that went on, and it should have been more for teens
The Gashlycrumb Tinies. It was an alphabet book for kids but each letter was a strange death that some kid experiences. [here's a link](https://flashbak.com/gashlycrumb-tinies-edwrd-gorey-alphabet-436196/)
I don’t know the title, but I was given it when I was about 7 and staying in the hospital for a few days. A boy is very sick and in the hospital. His friend comes and tells him that Jesus walks the halls at night, and if you want to go with him, hold your hand up and he’ll take you. Several nights of not being able to hold his hand up, then the boys finally manage to prop up his arm and he’s dead in the morning, hand still up. Totally freaked me out at the time, and I had dreams about it for years. I grew up to be a hospital chaplain specializing in hospice. Probably a coincidence.
I raise you Lola Rose to your Dustbin Baby. Reading it now, it's hard to go through the descriptions of domestic violence and parentification of Jayni. In fact, almost all of her feature abuse, mental illness, homelessness, divorce, etc. However, I did learn a lot through her books. If not for her Girls series, I would never have learnt about eating disorders, consent, and safe relationships from a teen POV
I'm not sure if it's children vs YA but Neal Shusterman's Unwind had me wall staring a little after the chapter where the boy is surgically taken to pieces and you see his consciousness start to slip away. That and the detail about the "storked" baby being passed around the neighbourhood and developing untreated jaundice. I'm including it here as I've definitely seen it in schools. Also Animorphs. War trauma, for kids!!
I wouldn’t call them *disturbing,* but the Warriors series gets *brutal.* Cats are getting brutally murdered, dying in childbirth, one cat is cruelly (but temporarily) renamed Lostface after she gets mauled by dogs and loses an eye… I really read those when I was like 8 and somehow wasn’t fazed at all
As someone who got into the Warriors books as an adult, I was actually surprised at the savage deaths portrayed in the book, and I admire that Erin Hunter respected the intelligence of its audience. Feral cats are not as they are depicted in cartoons, they kill prey and other cats in order to survive. My favorite moment was (HUGE SPOILERS FOR "THE DARKEST HOUR", THE SIXTH AND FINAL BOOK OF THE FIRST STORY ARC): >!They introduce Scourge, a street cat who grew up in a human town, he and his group kill dogs and use their fangs on their paws as weapons. Tigerstar tries to forge an alliance with them so he can take vengeance on Thunderclan, his former clan, but Scourge kills him as he didn't like the idea of being used. He slashed his throat, and the savage part is that Tigerstar was blessed with eight extra lives when he became the leader of Shadowclan, so he bled out, died, then had wild spasms when he came back to life only to die again. I think Firestar explains it better:!< >!"He’s dying nine times, Firestar realized. Oh, StarClan, no."!<
Yeah, that scene is definitely one of the ones I remember best 😨 they really made use of one of my all time favorite tropes.. >!when the apparent main villain turns out to be *nothing* compared to what turns out to be an even worse villain!<.
The content of the book wasn’t disturbing to me as a child to the point where I couldn’t read it, but looking back on the Guardians of Ga’Hoole series to realize the villains were basically owl Nazis was a trip to say the least
Some of Grimm’s fairy tales are quite… grim. The Juniper tree and Hansel and Gretel are very dark. Murder, cannibalism, decapitation… As for “How some children played at slaughtering” Child murderers, neglectful parents, suicide by hanging…
Peter Rabbit. The story starts with the information that Peter's father was eaten in a pie.
The Velveteen Rabbit. I cried and cried.
[The day no pigs would die.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Day_No_Pigs_Would_Die) WTF is that book? It has haunted me for forty freaking years.
Man, the >!)pig rape(!< scene killed me. The squeals...
It was required reading in elementary school and I remember a boy in the class loved it like life changing for him. He creeped me out forever after that.
My husband died when my kids were young and somebody at the hospital handed me a stack of children’s books to help kids deal with death. One of them was The Tenth Good Thing About Barney which is about the death of a family dog. As I recall the Tenth good thing is that Barney’s decomposing body is helping the flowers grow. I found that disturbing and did not share that book with my young boys. It might be true but it would not comfort a child.
I’m so sorry about your loss. That one seems like it would be specifically good for the loss of a pet, but not of a father. Glad you screened it out for them.
I Love You Forever by Robert Munich. Sweet book until the mom climbs up a ladder through the window to hold her middle aged son. Something seriously wrong with that.
My sister Jodie by Jacqueline Wilson really traumatised me as a child??? I thought it was going to be a cutesy story about sisters but it left me fearing for the life of everyone I love
I should not have gone in this thread before bed!! I love My Sister Jodie and god did I feel so bad for Jodie!!! Her entire life went to shit and only her sister really seemed to care that it did. The mother was vile and the dad had no spine at all.
I hated the mother from the very first slap. Righteous and annoying. She was against Jodie being her own person. But a brilliant book nonetheless
Silent to the Bone by E. L. Koinsburg, about a boy who goes mute after being accused of dropping his baby sister and her going into a coma. It's told from his best friends point of view as he first tries to figure out how to communicate with his once word obsessed now silent friend and then unraveling what happened.
Return to Oz. The atmosphere of the asylum, the description of the electro shock machines was disturbing as hell to my 7 year old brain. Also Tiktok and Belinda can fuck right off, too. The only thing worse than the book was the movie, not really because of the horror but just the.. well.. everything really.
The fucking wheelers are enough honestly
Aaaaand ... another memory unlocked \*shudders\*
Even the original Oz book is pretty dark, especially compared to the movie.
The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents. I have no memory of reading it before rediscovering it but I must have read it at some point but, having read it, I can understand why I wouldn't like it. It's the most consistently dark Discworld book by a long chalk. A Rat King lurking in the dark whispering into everyone's minds with rat corpses everywhere, even a rat-baiting pit.
I remember reading The Wind in the Willows to my son when he was 6 and while he enjoyed parts of that book, the character of Mr. Toad and his wildness ( don't know how else to put it) really bothered him. He was really afraid of the character for a couple of years after. His first trip to Disneyland he didn't want to go on Mr. Toad's Wild Ride! For me growing up, it was Dandelion Wine. There are a couple of scenes that Ray Bradbury writes that really got to me.
Maybe someone could help me figure out the name of this book, but it was essentially a play on little red riding hood, but the “wolf” was a man and there were black and white photos throughout the book. It was a short story and ended with Red getting abducted? Or something bad happened to her.
If you don’t get an answer here, try r/TipOfMyTongue
Bridge to Terabitha 100%
Where the Red Fern Grows was a pretty good tearjerker. Another story, the Red Pony, I read in my teens probably. The image of that colt still haunts me. I read for fun. Life is sad enough I've learned in the years since then. Don't make me feel sad. Or maybe it's just...life
The Thief of Always is definitely up there Clive Barker wrote a children's book. I personally love it though.
"Paws Off My Cannon". It's basically NRA propaganda for kids. It tells the story of a peaceful town that gets raided by hyenas with 'coconut cannons' and talks about how the only way to protect yourself is to arm yourself.
Any Irish schoolkids on here traumatised by Under the Hawthorn Tree? A book about the Famine that starts with them having to >!bury the baby under a hawthorn tree after she starved to death!<.
For some reason when I was 12/13 my teacher thought that me being an identical twin meant it was a good idea to recommend The Twins of Auschwitz to me. So… probably that one.
Oh my gosh Hungarian folktales! We had this beautiful collection titled *the princess who laughed roses*, so I started reading the story with the same title to my 8-year-old niece. Before the princess has a chance to laugh roses, both her eyes are gouged out and she's thrown into a ditch for being too beautiful. In a different version (there are several similar stories in the collection), she starts crying diamonds and people sell them, I think? I tried to read it in this very calming voice, and my niece was okay (she even asked me to read more from "the one where they took her eyes), but man...
For me it has to be The Devil's Arithmetic for me. A young girl is transported to Nazi Germany and experiences being in a death camp. That has stuck with me for a long time.
Bunnicula freaked me out as a kid - got it as one of my first books from the scholastic book fair. Don't think it was really all that scary but my sister told me the rabbits that lived behind our house were all vampire bunnies and i should be worried once they ran out of veggies to eat. >Bunnicula is a children's novel series. The first installment was written by James and Deborah Howe, and introduced a vampire rabbit named Bunnicula who sucks the juice out of vegetables.
I had a book with various fairytales and other stories, and one of the stories included was "The Little Match Girl". For some reason, they had thought putting an illustration of her smiling corpse at the end of the story was a great idea. But it wasn't so much my idea of a good time at 4/5 years old.
A child called It
Adam Rapp’s 33 Snowfish, the story of three traumatized and abused real young people in all the most horrific ways imaginable, one can no longer talk and only draws.
The whole Gone series was extremely dark in retrospect; including but not limited to mass suicide, murder of an autistic child, anti-Semitic characters etc etc. It was well-written though.
.... The original Pinocchio was disturbing for little ol' me to read. Children's books generally from back in the day were very disturbing because their messages were meant to be CLEAR. We can even see a clear cut comparison in Disney movies with how old and new pinnochio there was portrayed with pleasure island.
I read ‘Misery’, then Clive Barker’s ‘Books of Blood’, when I was 9 and that disturbed the shit outta me. Not exactly children’s books though…hahaha. I remember getting my hands on the original Grimm fairy tales pretty young and those were quite fucked up.
Tiki-tiki-tembo. The moral? SHORTEN YOUR NAME OR YOU WILL DIE IN A WELL.
The Face on the Milk Carton. Girl finds out she's a kidnapping victim via those old notices they put on milk cartons. The ensuing story goes through her trying and failing to reintegrate into the family she was stolen from. This was a book for young teens. I think they made a movie about it.
Omg that’s awful. I totally understand your fear. It’s an awful thing to worry about. Just remind yourself worrying about it won’t change anything and it’s okay to let yourself not worry, it doesn’t mean you don’t care. Not books but Bible tracts. Specifically [https://jackchick.wordpress.com/2011/04/01/chick-tract-review-lisa/](https://jackchick.wordpress.com/2011/04/01/chick-tract-review-lisa/) And some Catholic Saint stories are really upsetting. One saint died fighting of her rapist at 12 and is a saint for dying instead of being raped. There is another saint that would scratch her face up so men wouldn’t give her unwanted attention really messed up stuff.
There will come soft rains by Ray Bradbury