Really weird kids’ books from the past

[aweebitlost]

I was reading the DC The Elephant & the Bad Baby tonight and it struck me how very odd it is.

An elephant takes a baby for a joyride to nick a load of food and then everyone is cross with the baby for not saying please?!

Then there’s the Long Slide with the 3 stuffed animals that climb a giant slide, vomit, meet some witches etc and don’t seem to get any pleasure out of the experience.

AIBU or were some kids’ books from the past plain bizarre?! Any other good ones people can think of?

@TheSpiral

For me it is a book called Help! I'm a Prisoner in a Toothpaste Factory! I have never found anyone else who read it. Deeply, deeply strange both in the style of writing, the characters and the plot - boy gets messages in toothpaste from someone asking for help and discovers world is being taken over by dentist aliens, or something.

I was going to post exactly this! For once I RTFT! I was given it as a school prize or something - so weird, wish I hadn't been.

I remember the extremely creepy A Candle in her Room. Also a book called Roscoe's Leap - v weird but quite good, hinging on a French Revolution automaton in some kind of walled-off room.

The pages I find most strange about Each Peach Pear Plum are the ones with the 3 bears with rifles, Baby Bear having an 'accident' with one.

Yay @Ormally after 40 years of searching that's two other people that read a Candle in her Room on one thread. I have finally found my people!

Did you also have Midnight is a Place? (They made a series about it, but it was the written word that managed to poke my imagination into not erasing, ever, the description of a child sprinting under a square mill press to grab a slub off the centre of an as-yet-unglued cheap carpet.)

The Magic Pudding - l loved it, it's a saga about a smug Koala who leaves home to escape his uncle's whiskers and soup stealing lizards and falls in with an ex-sailor and a penguin and the foul-mouthed pudding they have stolen ...
I tried to read it to DS1 and realised it was totally deranged! ( Still love it, though )

Also The Midnight Folk - that was strange, too ...

@Ormally

Did you also have Midnight is a Place? (They made a series about it, but it was the written word that managed to poke my imagination into not erasing, ever, the description of a child sprinting under a square mill press to grab a slub off the centre of an as-yet-unglued cheap carpet.)

A quick search tells me that was Joan Aiken I can only remember ready Wolves of Willoughby Chase by her but I was 'a seven books a week from the library, plus school library books, plus swaps with friends and cousins' girl so I can't remember half of what I read 30-40 years ago.

@Legoisthebest

I've just remembered another one I read at my daughters school. It was an Allan Alhberg one (which are often a bit nutty) about a divorced couple who were fighting over the ownership of a pig and wanted to cut the pig in half. I remember I was reading it to the children at school but the teacher wanted to start a different lesson and I hadn't got to the end. I was all "no no no I NEED to know if this pig survives"

Not a weird story overall, but I was always struck by the throwaway remark in Beatrix Potter's "Little Pig Robinson" about Robinson's aunts, Dorcas and Porcas: "They led prosperous uneventful lives, and their end was bacon".

Oldest Ds had a set of paperback books I think were set in Australia that were so weird. Something to do with killer sheep and a rotten apple and some people trying to avoid them and stay alive.
This was in the 90's

Beatrix Potter is very weird they way the animals are quite human with names and can talk etc, but there’s always this sense of real deadly threat hanging over animals that are about to get eaten or shot etc.

As a child I absolutely loved Pigling Bland and the ominous horror of crossing the county boundary and not being able to come back. I had no idea what that even meant but it was so emotive and powerful. Also the Taylor of Gloucester and the really animal nature of the cat who goes out shopping for his sick owner like an anthropomorphic character, but also intends to eat the mice.

I love her and have the full set of her books but to my dismay the DC were never really into them.

DS1 loved Squirrel Nutkin which is pretty out there - Non-neurotypical riddle obsessed squirrel gets his tail bitten off by an owl ...

@errnerrcallnernnernnern

Has Flowers in the Attic been mentioned yet? That one always comes up on these threads. I’ve never read it.

I read it when I was about 12 or 13. It still haunts me now in my mid 40s

@isittimetogotobed

The mole who had a poo on his head

Oh we loved that! It's not weird.

@Ormally @Runningupthecurtains I loved Joan Aiken. I wasn't a huge fan of midnight is a place, but I loved the wolves of Willoughby chase, Blackhearts in Battersea and so on. Even better are the volumes of short stories. I still read those regularly now some 50 years on. And read them to my dad when he was in a coma in ICU before he died because he first read them to us when we were tiny.

Goodnight Moons really pretty weird.

@nonevernotever she is on my list to introduce DS to - I will have to see if her her story collection is still available.

Hound Gelert.

It’s a traditional Welsh tale about Llywelyn the Great and his faithful deer hound. One day Llywelyn goes hunting and leaves the dog to guard his new born baby. When he gets home, the cradle is overturned, the dog is smeared in blood and as the dog jumps up to greet his master, Llywelyn plunges his sword into Gelert and kills him - just as he hears his son cry from underneath the cradle and sees in the corner the body of a massive wolf that Gelert had slain to protect the boy.

When I was a TA, this story was part of our school’s reading scheme and without exception, whenever a pupil read it to me, and despite trying to detach myself, the tears would roll down my face! I would end up apologising to the puzzled child and reassuring them it wasn’t anything they had done. I always felt it was a miserable story to give to 7/8 year olds but it never seemed to upset any of them like it did me!

Oh yes Beatrix Potter....
I love the one where Tom Kitten gets kidnapped by the rats and they plan to cook him in a pie. When he is rescued mother cat takes the pastry he was wrapped up in and makes a pie of her own. Gross...it would be all dusty and manky surely.

The Fairy Caravan by Beatrix Potter is a weird and wonderful read, but few people seem to know of it. It’s about a guinea pig who runs away and joins a magical circus troupe of animals.

@Legoisthebest

Oh yes Beatrix Potter.... I love the one where Tom Kitten gets kidnapped by the rats and they plan to cook him in a pie. When he is rescued mother cat takes the pastry he was wrapped up in and makes a pie of her own. Gross...it would be all dusty and manky surely.

I love that undercurrent of realistic brutality in Beatrix potter books! It’s very practical, and the contrast between today’s “image” of Beatrix potter (cutesy animals dressed in clothes) and the tone of many actual stories amuses me.

My son was in stitches over “the fierce bad rabbit” - I think they’re properly appreciated by slightly older children now if you can get them to listen!
en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Story_of_A_Fierce_Bad_Rabbit

I remember a childrens book from the early 80’s (possibly late 70’s), where there were some children looking at their fireplace, when they somehow shrunk and were able to walk through the embers, but didn’t get burnt. They may have been looking for someone/something?

Not really a weird book but I always laughed at the ending of the first Mog book, when they gave the burglar a cup of tea after the police caught him

Pippi Longstocking, The Funny Guy and Stig of the Dump are books I remember from primary school. They seemed to be about children who were somewhat 'different' , but who had incredible strength, resilience or found friendship. I also loved Friday afternoons, when the teacher would read extracts from The Incredible Journey. The Dr Seuss books were really amusing to me , as a young child.

We seemed to read a lot. I remember reading The Mutants of The Badlands in Secondary school and The Sword in the Stone

I do not remember anything 'weird', although I am sure there were some strange books. However, there were some books that would be very inappropriate today. These include the gender stereotypical Janet and John books and the highly racist 'Little Black Sambo'.

I remember The Owl Service. Also The Wicked Wicked Ladies in the Haunted house. So creepy.

And I loved the Indian in the Cupboard series and still have my copies. Omri and Patrick had an amazing time!

Naughty Agapanthus was a favourite too. She dared to bite the doctor. It was so shocking for me!

@nonevernotever I also read to my Dad when I thought he was not going to come out of hospital - not in ICU but after 2 unexpected blood transfusions and the invader that necessitated them. That was The Phantom Tollbooth. He must have read it to me about 6 times when I was in primary school, but mainly because he loved it and I went along with it. One of the hardest things I remember doing even though it 'had to be done'. Very sorry that you lost your Dad.

Re the room in Goodnight Moon being massive - I always thought the child rabbit was staying with his grandparents, which is why the room is bigger than a child's room would normally be. And he has to say goodnight to everything because he's in an unfamiliar (ugly) room.

I loved Marianne Dreams as a kid but those fucking stones with the eyes terrified me. They still prey on my mind late at night sometimes!

Has anyone read Marianne and Mark, which was the follow-up to Marianne Dreams? She gies to Brighton to convalesce and ends up making a voodoo doll of some girl she's being bullied by or something. Would live to re-read it as an adult!

I love Goodnight Moon and DS demanded it every night for ages. My favourite is the "Goodnight nobody" page :)

But the room is hideous and yes way too big. I always redesign rooms in my head so I decided if I lived in that house it would be my room (the tiny rabbit can have a smaller one!) and I used to think about where I'd put everything - as I read through it for the 1000th time...