The quest for "darker" children's books isn't just about the scares - This Week's #ReadItTorial

A master class in dark storytelling, "Black Dog" by Levi Pinfold

Sure, we've banged on about this one quite often but it's a subject that seems to have had a bit of a resurgence on Twitter over the last couple of weeks, so once again we're digging into it in our regular #ReaditTorial slot.

Many well-meaning articles demonstrate the allure of sometimes dark and quite often grisly children's stories, with quite a few of the most celebrated 'darker' children's books hailing from non-english-speaking countries and creators. For example, the french in particular seem to be absolutely brilliant experts at designing and devising darker children's books without aiming straight for the 'jump scare' approach.

Perhaps one of the reasons for the clamouring renewed demands aimed at publishers to start indulging authors and illustrators who want to explore darker themes in children's books makes sense. After all, authors feel that they are in direct competition to some extent with the rise, and rise, and unchecked / unmonitored rise in darker content available to kids via other means - chiefly the internet, and in particular YouTube.

I doubt anyone involved in kidlit would want to see books arriving on shelves that were in any way derivative of the sort of horrible mind-bendingly inappropriate content viewable on YouTube and other social media outlets, but there's something to be said for the undercurrent bubbling under this fresh demand for darker material - the rise and rise of 'issues' books, particularly in picture book form, that feel each and every story must set out to set the world to right in some way.

Most book bloggers worth their salt will be able to reel off a huge list of 'dark' books that perform the neat balancing trick of having a darker look and feel about them, but masking off their moral message without jamming it in your face in the last quarter of the book (in the case of the book featured in our header image, "Black Dog" by Levi Pinfold, the subject of fear itself is dealt with deftly and beautifully, and the underlying message of Small's bravery is more subtly woven into the story than being the be all and end all of this darkly delicious tale).

I do take issue with the 'grown-up' way of looking at this issue. In some ways, it feels like creatives are merely prodding a red ants nest that threatens to explode.  We often become carried away with the notion that the death of dark books is purely about agents and publishers 'nannying' kids away from anything that might play on their minds long after the covers are closed and the other covers are pulled up around their chins before bedtime. So let's be clear about what 'dark' actually means, and it definitely does not mean creating something that's going to scare the living pee out of a child to such an extent that it could actually put them off stories and books for good.

C has a rather neat approach to dark books - she enjoys them, and is at the moment firmly wrapped up in the brilliant world of "Lockwood and Co" by Jonathan Stroud...

These books are always read during the day (currently we squeeze a reading session in before school, which always takes a bit of juggling, but is nonetheless satisfying and helps us get through our review pile a bit quicker).

Though Jonathan's books hark back to the heady days of the 70s and 80s when kids books really were a lot darker (as we've mentioned before, anyone who remembers all those Thames Methuen ghost anthologies will remember just how scary those books were), they are nonetheless compelling and demand to be read.

Kids don't always want to play it safe with books, but the best 'dark' books are never purely about scares - they're about a tight observation of what it actually is that works on a child's mind, and in some ways you can understand why agents and publishers steer clear of them.

Most kids spend a lot of their childhood scared or something. Whether it's an irrational fear of buttons, or a very real fear of heights, water, even birds, the majority of scary books usually aim for the easy way out, and end up pretty harmless and not dark or scary at all.

We tend to like books that leave a twist entirely up to the reader to interpret, and we rather like it when authors merely raise their eyebrows enigmatically if anyone tries to analyse their books to death in interviews and such. To my mind, there's not nearly enough mystery left in stories, possibly because internet pundits do love to neatly compartmentalize everything, including kids books.

Authors and illustrators who have kids or young relatives themselves have a ready resource to tap into in order to write authoritatively about fear and fear response. Most will also expertly draw on their own childhood memories of what scared them, and there's a very good chance that today's kids will also find those things scary too (for me, the opening credits to a TV show called "Armchair Thriller" still nudges at the back of my memory as something that traumatised me as a kid. Book wise it was nearly always stuff I read that I really had no business reading!)

We do have to draw a pretty firm line between the camps of "Dark & scary" and "traumatic" and the distant camp of "Bloody disturbing" (and in some of the articles wishing for a return to darker themes, a lot of the qualifying books brought up as an example really aren't dark or scary, but pretty flipping sick-making and harrowing if you boil them down to their constituent parts).

As I've said before in ReadItTorials, the children's picture book market in particular could do with taking off the safety stabilisers, perhaps letting kids experience the imbalanced wobble of fear from time to time. Going through books that have become "Book of the Week" faves over the years, we see books again and again that veer off the fluffy bunny path and dig deep into the twisted boughs of the dark scary woods instead, but as we all know, all kids are different - and children's books are finally beginning to realise that there's no 'one size fits all' approach when it comes to stories.

I have a huge amount of respect for authors who can not only write dark stuff successfully, but can find an agent or publisher who is willing to take a chance that their book will fly. Without them, we'd be left with 'safe' but perhaps a far less interesting and less diverse / rich book world to dive into.