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Fi's Five Favorite Terrifying Children's Stories #1: Matilda

4/29/2014

(Click the links to read Terrifying Children’s Story #2, #3, #4, and #5)

Only one Roald Dahl entry, I promised myself, otherwise this master of whimsical nightmares could have taken up much of this list.

It's no real surprise he's in the top spot, is it?

Matilda may not be responsible for quite as many childhood sleepless nights the world over as Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, but it is my favorite Roald Dahl story, and it's my list, damnit.

Book or movie? Either. The movie's fairly faithful apart from Americanizing the story, and though each is more horrifying than the other in its own way, both are all-around terrifying.

If you haven't read or seen it, here's how it goes:

Matilda is the daughter of an absolutely awful family, who are oblivious to how precocious she is and prone to punishing her for such sins as reading and asking logical questions. In spite of or more probably because of this, she soon realizes she's more than just smarter than her parents; she's also a budding telekinetic.

The adult version of this story.

And that’s not the half of it.

She finds herself in a school run by a raging (and super strong) lunatic, Miss Trunchbull, whose disciplinary philosophy falls somewhere in the same school of thought with this guy.

Matilda's new principal likes to open with this one:

Follow it up with a little of this:

Yes, I know this one wasn't you, Jigsaw. Please don't kill me.

And then there's this masterpiece:

Oh, wait, that last picture actually is from Matilda?

Wow, Dahl, you make my job too easy.

Matilda finds some comfort in her classmates and her teacher, Miss Honey, who turns out to be Miss Trunchbull's niece.

Here's where the terrors of the book and movie diverge.

In both cases, Miss Trunchbull murdered Miss Honey's father and stole her inheritance.

In the book, Miss Trunchbull also has Miss Honey intimidated into signing over all the money she makes herself, leaving her with an unlivable allowance, and Matilda resolves to use her power to rescue her.

So we've got a grown up bully so good at bullying that she can keep intelligent adults under her thumb with no legal grounds behind her.

The movie gives Miss Honey a little more credit for standing what legal ground she has and exercising what freedom she can. She lives on a high school teacher's salary and stays at the school to take care of her students. Miss Trunchbull still has her inheritance and her sentimental childhood possessions, though, and that's what Matilda's going to get back for her.

Miss Trunchbull loses a lot of her superhuman influence on the adult world this way, but she makes up for it several times over in the sequence the movie adds in which Matilda sneaks into her house and tries to steal back Miss Honey's things.

Miss Trunchbull naturally comes home in the middle in one of her mad rages, caused by Matilda's father for unrelated reasons no less, and it's quite clear from the moment she realizes someone's in her house that she's not going to bother with the cops no matter who it is. She’s going to kill whoever she finds with her bare hands if she has to tear the house to pieces to get to them.

What follows is very much like this:

True, Matilda ultimately sets everything right, moves in with Miss Honey, and lives happily ever after without a drop of pig's blood in sight, but until then we spend her story, whether on page or screen, in a Roald Dahl world of surrealist childhood nightmare, unbound by any adult knowledge of what is and isn't likely or possible for the bad guys to do or get away with.

Come to think of it, how did any of us grow old enough to gather that knowledge without frightening ourselves to death first?

Agree? Disagree? Comments are always welcome! Or keep up with my fictional musings by joining me on Facebook, on Twitter, or by signing up for email updates in the panel on the right!

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Book Review: Panic

4/26/2014

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Book Review:

Panic

By Lauren Oliver

Harper Collins 2014

A-

The Basics:

Every summer in the small town of Carp, graduating high school seniors play a dangerous game they call Panic. Every student pays into the prize fund. Winner takes all. Heather wants to find out if she's more than someone's pathetic ex. Dodge wants revenge for what happened to his sister in her game. Nat will use anything at her disposal to get on her feet. Bishop wants to keep his friends safe.

The Downside:

There's a feeling throughout the book of elements coming together, everyone's agendas and half mentioned details of their stories weaving and building toward one explosive conclusion, and... they don't. Not really. The ending feels like an epilogue that was decided upon before the rest of the story was formed, and then was tacked on to cut things off when they started to run over 400 pages.

A few pieces of the story along the way feel missing too, with characters fighting, disappearing, getting themselves into trouble, and then showing up a few chapters later with minimal explanation, leaving us to fill in the gaps after their earlier cliffhangers.

The Upside:

I swear this woman could write a nine part epic about people sitting through jury duty and never getting picked, and I wouldn't be able to put it down.

No matter what tangible problems there are that would be infuriating in any other book, it's such a joy to read the descriptions along the way that it's hard to be too bothered. Everything from the atmospheric details (a car sounds "like an old man trying to choke out a belt buckle"), to the deepest emotional lives of the characters is spot-on and vivid enough to get lost in.

Heather's fear of never being loved like the "pocket-sized" girls get to be is stunningly real without rendering her weak or annoying, an honest flashback to high school without the filter of adult hindsight, and the sad, conflicting, complicated mess that is Nat is miles beyond what you'd expect from the character who tries to sleep and flirt her way to what she needs.

The juxtaposition of the high stakes game and the grounded contemporary setting also adds to the distinct and immersive flavor. When people first hear "YA" in conjunction with "dangerous game," it brings to mind yet another dystopian Hunger Games knockoff, but that’s far from the case here. The game Panic is not only voluntary but illegal. It's conducted underground by Carp's youth, players can opt out at any time, deaths associated with the game are unintentional (though not uncommon), and a lot of effort is put into ensuring secrecy, dodging the authorities, and keeping the game going to serve the players' various purposes.

As big a Hunger Games fan as I am, in the wake of all the imitators, the completely different dynamic of Panic is a fascinating and refreshing change of pace.

Agree? Disagree? Comments are always welcome! Or keep up with my fictional musings by joining me on Facebook, on Twitter, or by signing up for email updates in the panel on the right!

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Fi's Five Favorite Terrifying Children's Stories #2: Peter Pan

4/22/2014

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(Click the links to read Terrifying Children’s Story #3, #4, and #5)

Ooh, I knew this one was going to come up again.

We all know Peter Pan, right? The immortal kid who invites other kids to Neverland, where they'll never have to grow up?

What's so terrifying about that?

Well, let's start with the terrors most people know. Like in Annie, Peter Pan's lead preteen characters get themselves in very real danger, in spite of the all-fun-and-games facade Neverland puts up.

Captain Hook fully intends to kill Peter given the slightest chance, and he's perfectly happy to kill as many of the other Neverland kids as happen to cross his path.

Except Wendy. If he succeeds in annihilating the Lost Boys, he's going to take Wendy alive, to keep as the pirate ship's "mother." At least, that's the extent of the kids' understanding of his intentions.

The fact that Peter and Hook's rivalry is a to-the-death thing isn't remotely vague or subtle. Apart from Hook trying to poison Peter, there are vivid descriptions of the rages Hook is prone to flying into, when he disembowels people with his hook.

Peter's in it that deep too. He refuses a chance to escape with all his friends in the last battle because "It's Hook or me this time."

But Hook is the villain. Villains are expected to be scary and often to bring out the worst in heroes. He may be a bit on the extreme side as kids’ books go, but not too far out of the ordinary. Not enough to put this story in the #2 spot.

What makes Peter Pan exceptionally terrifying is Peter himself.

I've written before about why Peter is one of my favorite tragic figures. I almost hesitate to call him a tragic hero, but if Macbeth merits the title, I suppose Peter must too. He's an antihero through and through, the deeply flawed cause of his own unhappy ending, which is something you don't often see in children's literature outside of bland, two dimensional morality tales.

Peter has in all likelihood killed more people than Hook. And I'm not talking about killing pirates to protect the lost boys. The thing all the movie adaptations fail to mention is that Neverland doesn't actually keep its inhabitants from aging. Peter is the only one frozen in time, the only one who can't tell imagination from reality, and the only one whose thoughts the island responds to.

Peter is forever trying to preserve his world of fantastical childhood, and anyone who challenges him or simply gets too old for his taste in friends, he kills. We're told this as a fact from the start. Some of the lost boys love Peter as the closest thing to a parent they can remember having, but everyone in Neverland lives in fear of his wild mood swings and whims.

No, he doesn't eliminate any of the Lost Boys within the timeline of the story, but from the moment we land on the island, when Peter comes within inches of stabbing one of them who was tricked into shooting Wendy with an arrow, there's a creeping feeling of wanting to go home where there are sane and trustworthy adults.

Wendy eventually does leave, taking one batch of Lost Boys with her. To his credit, Peter lets them go, and it seems to be more than one of his whims. He's had relationships with generation after generation of the girls in Wendy's family, and apparently they've all survived him to grow up and have daughters of their own.

But the other parts of the cycle continue as well, with Peter never growing up, searching forever for other children to keep him company.

Forever and ever.

Agree? Disagree? Comments are always welcome! Or keep up with my fictional musings by joining me on Facebook, on Twitter, or by signing up for email updates in the panel on the right!

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Giveaway + Guest Post by Jo Schneider, Author of New Sight

4/19/2014

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Today on Confessions of the One and Only F.J.R. Titchenell (That I Know of), I'd like to welcome Jo Schneider, author of New Sight, which will be available April 22nd!

(You can read my review here).

There's a giveaway at the bottom of this page, but first, I got to ask Jo one of my favorite questions!

What frightens you, and how does it influence your work?

Plenty of things frighten me. Stupid people driving on snowy roads are terrifying. The thought of bad writers taking over The Walking Dead doesn't do me any favors. I don't like bugs—yeah, yeah, I'm bigger than them, whatever. I'm not overly fond of banjos and the thought of being forced to eat cooked vegetables is enough to send me into a series of fits that never did get me out of eating canned peas and carrots.

But what really gets me. What will start my heart pounding and provoke cold sweat into trickling down my back, is both wolves and the dark.

I blame The Never Ending Story for the wolves. Hated that big, black one. It still sends shivers down my spine.

However, the dark. Oh how I do not like the dark. Especially being outside at night. Alone. With all of that black and shadows and little noises that don't exist during the day.

I'm a writer, for crying out loud, I have an overzealous imagination, so in my mind there are magical creatures out there ready to eat me, or take me to another realm or very simply squish me for fun. And let's not even talk about what real life creatures could be lurking out there. Things that come in the dark are never friendly in my mind.

Now that I'm thinking about it, I should probably do something to get over this fear. But not now. Later. Tomorrow. When it's light again.

The main character in New Sight ends up in a very dark dream-like world a few times. She gets trapped there , and I feel like I capture her fear pretty well. Lys (like bliss) wasn't afraid of the dark before her story starts, but by the end she's not a real fan.

I have a couple of tense scenes that happen in a darkened basement of a hospital as well as in the woods. Oh, and sewers.

Wow, I'd never thought about this before. Great question!

It's hardly surprising that my fears came out in these scenes, because as a writer writing what you know feels more real than anything else. Granted, I could take my fear of the dark and channel it into fear of heights, do some Googling, ask my sister (she hates the heights) and get a pretty good phobia going on for a character. That works.

I think the best part about fears is where they come from. It's always interesting to get the flashback to a character's fear of goats, or blue Skittles.

My fear of the dark came from the creepy basement in my house growing up. The furnace made strange noises, and light seemed to get sucked out of the entire space. I would go down the stairs, hang onto the wall and lean over as far as I could to reach the light switch so I didn't have to step on the orange, shag carpet without the lights on. Do not let those toes down until the lights come on. I really liked it when we got a switch you could push instead of toggle. Slapping that thing is still satisfying.

I might have something against orange, shag carpet too. But that doesn't make an appearance in the story. Neither do wolves. Not this time.

About New Sight

Addiction equals power, but at what cost?

After succumbing to the sudden and terrifying urge to rip people's eyes out of their sockets, sixteen-year-old Lysandra Blake finds herself tied down in a psych ward, convinced she's crazy. The doctors have no answers, and Lys is ready to give up when the mysterious Jeremiah Mason appears, telling Lys that she's not insane—she's addicted to a rare and deadly drug that she has no recollection of using. Mr. Mason offers to take her to his facility where he can treat her.

Desperate yet suspicious, Lys agrees to go with Mr. Mason to his facility where she meets with a fellow addict, the tall and handsome Kamau. Together they discover that Mr. Mason may not have told them the truth about their condition—they're thrown headfirst into a world of daunting powers that are not only unbelievable, they are dangerous. Very dangerous.

Click here to preorder!

About Jo Schneider

Jo Schneider lives in Bountiful, Utah, but she has spent countless hours traveling all over the world. Her goal is to visit all seven continents, and she's nearly finished. Being a geek at heart, Schneider has always been drawn to science fiction and fantasy; she writes both. Based on her travels and her experience obtaining a black belt in Shaolin Kempo Karate, Schneider's works feature authentic, impressive settings and extraordinary action sequences.

You can find her on her blog, Facebook, Twitter, and Goodreads.

a Rafflecopter giveaway

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Fi's Five Favorite Terrifying Children's Stories #3: Annie

4/15/2014

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(Click the links to read Terrifying Children’s Story #4 and #5)

Let's skip the original "Little Orphant Annie" poem, which was creepy in ways only 1880s cautionary tales can be. That would take a whole post of its own to explore. And we can skip over the comic strip, Little Orphan Annie, because it was written more for adults, and the radio show simply because I know next to nothing about it.

I'm talking about the musical so well known for introducing kids to Broadway that it's been adapted to screen by Disney.

Let us also set aside the fact that this is a story about an eleven-year-old girl who gets taken in by a reclusive middle aged man.

So it's about a kid getting adopted. That can be a wonderful thing. The creepiness we find in that is mainly a product of our paranoid generation, and the real life horrors that do exist to fuel that paranoia are again more depressing than what this list was made for.

And why dwell on deliberate (if easy) misinterpretations of a story so teaming with intentional horror?

The whole setup for Annie is unabashedly Dickensian.

Annie was abandoned when she was born by parents who left a note promising to return, and who then disappeared without a trace. She lives in a 1930s orphanage where she's starved, exploited for slave labor, routinely beaten (okay, okay, Disney mostly removes that part), and sleeps in a room full of other girls who lack her Shirley Temple-esque optimism and often scream in the night from their various PTSD-induced night terrors.

Well, she's got nowhere to go but up, and her salvation comes in the form of a publicity stunt by Mr. Warbucks, one of the uber-rich, who's worried about his business's public image, given the Great Depression, and all.

His godawful name can't be helping any with that either.

He's not actually planning to adopt Annie, he's only going to let her stay in his mansion for the holidays. After that, when the charity hype season is over, he's going to dump her right back where he got her from.

For reasons that are never fully explained, Annie just wants to spend the holiday hanging out with Mr. Warbucks, rather than enjoying the splendor of his home in the company of his far more welcoming and approachable servants.

Well, one possible reason occurs. Maybe Annie recognizes the opportunity to make a very powerful friend.

Suddenly Annie seems a lot smarter than she did when I was a kid.

Annie coaxes Mr. Warbucks into taking her out to a Broadway show himself, and he has fun for the first time in no one knows how long. He offers to adopt her, but Annie wants her own parents back, and like the now-doting tycoon he is, Mr. Warbucks throws money at her problem, offering a giant reward to anyone who can prove themselves to be Annie's parents.

How could this possibly go wrong?

Like this, but with less adorable con artists.

Well, since she knows every bit of personal information Annie knows about herself, the evil mistress of the orphanage sees an excellent chance to set herself up for life. She and her brother plot to pose as Annie's parents (because this is the wacky kind of story where disguises work like that), to collect the reward money.

Whoever gets the money gets Annie, so once they've got both, they're going to throw her back in the orphanage, right?

No, she could escape and blow the whistle on them. They’re going to murder her.

They show us the knife.

To pull off an act of fraud, they are going to kill an eleven-year-old with a switchblade.

Okay, maybe that's not quite horror stuff, but it would be right at home in an ultra-dark action flick starring Liam Neeson.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is where I think the real disconnect is between childhood and adult perceptions of how scary many of these stories are, the reason kids can handle things that can still horrify if you give them enough thought later in life: danger to children.

As children, the children in stories are our heroes, protagonists, our figures for identification. They're people like us. And like people of any age, we like to see our protagonists face real stakes and real danger.

As we get older, we begin to see children as something separate from ourselves, fragile and sacred, something to be protected, and suddenly these fictional children in deadly danger are far more disturbing to us than the most horrific things that could happen to an adult cast.

It's the grown up authors who can bring themselves to put those fictional kids in peril who have the best chance of also being able to engage real kids in the story.

The same naturally goes for not coddling or condescending to fictional teenagers.

So that's my writerly soapbox moment this week.

Annie is the first story on this list to demonstrate this phenomenon, but it won't be the last.

Oh, she's fine, by the way. Annie. Her real parents are finally traced, they're dead, she comes to terms with the fact that she's always sort of known they'd have come back by now if they weren't, with the help of her new filthy rich family.

Hurrah!

Agree? Disagree? Comments are always welcome! Or keep up with my fictional musings by joining me on Facebook, on Twitter, or by signing up for email updates in the panel on the right!

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Book Review: Eleanor (The Unseen)

4/12/2014

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Book Review:

Eleanor (The Unseen)

By Johnny Worthen

Jolly Fish Press, 2014

A+

Click here to preorder!

(I received a free copy from the publisher in exchange for an honest review)

The Basics:

This is a tough one to describe without giving too much away, so bear with me. Eleanor is trying to slip through life unnoticed. Apart from her less earthly reasons, she and her terminally ill mother, and only confidante, are on public assistance, terrified of being separated by social services. As her mother's condition deteriorates and David, the only friend Eleanor has ever had, returns to town, she has to decide whether to open up and build a real life, or run away as she always has.

The Downside:

Um... let's see... well, David is the boyfriend every girl should dream of, and his patience with Eleanor is incredibly sweet, but just for the sake of giving him a bit more credit as someone in love rather than someone possibly addicted to abuse, she could be a bit less horrible to him at a few points when she’s less consciously trying to drive him away. And when Eleanor really starts to use what she is, maybe the chain of events could have been a little simpler. One plan gone awry fewer. Maybe.

This section was hard to fill. It's a really, really good book.

The Upside:

Eleanor. The book and the character. It's pretty much all upside. The character of Eleanor is written with the depth and absence of condescension I always hope for in female leads but so rarely find. She loves deeply but is more than her love. She’s heroic yet vulnerable. The nature of what she is (which I shall not spoil) seamlessly influences the way she thinks and sees the world, making her distinctive and memorable.

Eleanor isn't all that's vividly realized, either. For example, there's a part in which two characters in the same place at the same time are referred to by the same name for reasons I can't go into without spoilers. There are hardly any extra words used to specify which one is meant in each instance, and yet the whole sequence is far less confusing than this sentence describing it, because everything is so crisply described and the characters so identifiable by more than name or appearance.

The magic is well integrated into the world, without taking over the whole story. The quite grounded drama surrounding the viciousness of the rumor mill, especially its treatment of girls, is cutting, insightful, and painfully relatable. The romance, rocky as Eleanor's struggle makes it, has a beautiful earnestness to it, and no matter how twisting and turning the final act, I was very sorry to see it end.

Agree? Disagree? Comments are always welcome! Or keep up with my fictional musings by joining me on Facebook, on Twitter, or by signing up for email updates in the panel on the right!

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Fi's Five Favorite Terrifying Children's Stories #4: Charlotte's Web

4/8/2014

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(Click here to read Terrifying Children’s Story #5)

Charlotte's Web, You ask? Isn't that one of those cute barnyard stories about talking animals?

And it's not this one, right?

Yes, it's about cute talking farm animals who aren't reenacting the Russian revolution.

It's also a children's story with a protagonist whose only goal is to avoid being butchered.

The adult version of this plot.

That's the whole dramatic question of this book, "Will our hero, Wilbur, be killed and eaten?"

It's a children's book with this gem of an opening line:

"Where’s Papa going with that ax?"

If you haven't read it, here's how it goes:

Wilbur is the runt of a litter of piglets. He's rescued from being killed with said ax the day he's born by the farmer's daughter, Fern, who bottle feeds him herself but loses interest in him when they both get older.

By then, Wilber's grown up as strong and healthy as any of the other pigs, and the farmer is starting to think about when he should be slaughtered, because he's a pig.

Wilbur befriends a spider who lives in his pen, Charlotte, and to save him, she starts spinning messages about how special he is into her webs for the humans to see.

Spoiler alert, it eventually works... for Wilbur.

Charlotte manages to get the humans to think of Wilbur as special, but that doesn't do anything for the other pigs we conveniently don't get to know.

There's no indication at any time that Wilbur actually is special as the pigs in this anthropomorphic universe go, so one can only assume that there are countless other pigs enduring the same terror who don’t find a way out of it.

This is the equivalent of a horror movie with a sole survivor as opposed to none at all.

That is, if that sole survivor were then kept as a pet mascot for the rest of his life by the villains.

Also, this book's most heartwarming moment is a loving description of a spider's egg sac hatching and swarming the hero's cell.

Just sayin'

Agree? Disagree? Comments are always welcome! Or keep up with my fictional musings by joining me on Facebook, on Twitter, or by signing up for email updates in the panel on the right!

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Book Review: New Sight

4/6/2014

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Book Review:

New Sight

By Jo Schneider

Jolly Fish Press, 2014

B

(I received a free copy from the publisher in exchange for an honest review)

The Basics:

Lys has recently developed a disquieting compulsion to rip people's eyes out of their sockets. She’s been confined to a hospital bed, restrained for her protection and others', when a mysterious new doctor arrives, claiming he knows what's happening to her and how to help in his secluded facility. It turns out Lys is a magic user who hasn't learned how to deal with magic's dangerous and addictive properties. There are multiple schools of thought as to what should be done with magic users, and Lys and her new friends, met at the facility and later on the road, must decide which organization to place their trust in.

The Downside:

Origin story-itis. Large sections of the book are devoted to explaining the complicated nature of magic in this universe and contrasting it to anything similar in existing works, all without quite achieving clarity. This version of magic is an addiction it's impossible to break oneself of, and it's never established what the right thing to do about that is, or even what viable options there are to choose from.

Most of the rest of the text is spent on constant action, always with our heroes being attacked by whichever group they don't currently trust and somehow escaping, which becomes a bit monotonous.

The Upside:

If you thought that description of the basics sounded awesome, well, I concur, and that is still what the book is about. The opening and the introduction to the mysterious rehab facility have a great feeling of anticipation to them, and the guts promised by the premise carry through to the story. All that action is real, with few metaphorical rubber bullets. People get hurt, they get maimed, and the ones we do get enough non-magic-explaining downtime with to get attached to, well, they're not safe, so keep a few tissues on hand.

Schneider is clearly well-versed in the genre, and both the magic and action are well described and very visual. Should there ever be a sequel I like to imagine that the setup provided by New Sight would leave room for a lot of good adventure.

Agree? Disagree? Comments are always welcome! Or keep up with my fictional musings by joining me on Facebook, on Twitter, or by signing up for email updates in the panel on the right!

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Fi's Five Favorite Terrifying Children's Stories #5: Grimm's Fairytales

4/2/2014

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Happy April! I wracked my brain for an appropriately silly list for this month of foolishness.

Then I decided to share some of my favorite terrifying children's stories instead.

Don't worry, this'll be fun too!

As a YA Horror author, I often have to listen to people complain about how dark and violent teen literature is today. Okay, I guess everyone has to listen to the complaints that "children grow up so fast these days!" as if there were an abundance of times and places more conducive with a tolerable and leisurely process of growing up than the modern first world.

I considered a lot of pictures to illustrate this point. Puppies are less depressing.

However, I also have the joy of having to defend my genre to people, many of whom will never understand it.

I'm a passionate believer in the value of horror, the freedom of art, and the competence of most young people to judge what kinds of stories they can handle, all subjects I've written on before and no doubt will again, but in the spirit of the month, I'm going to skip the rest of the heavy and get right to the fun, to a celebration of the monsters under all our beds, the ones we fought and beat before the first pangs of puberty but can still look back on with a satisfying chill.

It's not possible to tackle this topic without a nod to the horrifying European children's folktales as compiled by The Brothers Grimm, but these bite-sized terrors have already been well analyzed by more specialized scholars than myself, and I couldn't pick just one, so let's just kick off the new month with a highlights reel of my favorite horrible moments sitting in plain sight in the most popular Grimm’s stories!

Skipping the parts that seem to be disturbing without knowledge of the original tellers,

Like this part of the original Sleeping Beauty

We've got such intentional horror as:

Rapunzel's prince getting pushed out of the tower and having his eyes gouged out on the thorn bushes below.

Self-administered foot mutilation in Cinderella.

That part in Snow White where the queen’s goon is supposed to kill her and bring back her internal organs as proof.

An alarming number of stories (Snow White again, Hansel and Gretel) about people taking children out into the woods to murder them.

The whole damn story of Bluebeard, about a woman who discovers the room where her new husband keeps the dismembered corpses of his past wives.

Oh, and the fact that Rumplestiltskin is about a young woman who is forced to spin straw into gold or be executed, and her only hope for survival is to make a deal with a villain who demands her future baby as payment.

Yes, we all knew that one. Just soak it in.

Sorry, kids, sometimes your life just sucks.

Plenty of modern YA could take some creepiness cues off these childhood classics. In fact, I might be getting inspired here...

Next week, we'll get to some meatier and more neglected children's terrors!

Agree? Disagree? Comments are always welcome! Or keep up with my fictional musings by joining me on Facebook, on Twitter, or by signing up for email updates in the panel on the right!

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Fi's Five Favorite Terrifying Children's Stories #1: Matilda

Book Review: Panic

Fi's Five Favorite Terrifying Children's Stories #2: Peter Pan

Giveaway + Guest Post by Jo Schneider, Author of New Sight

What frightens you, and how does it influence your work?

About New Sight

About Jo Schneider

Fi's Five Favorite Terrifying Children's Stories #3: Annie

Book Review: Eleanor (The Unseen)

Fi's Five Favorite Terrifying Children's Stories #4: Charlotte's Web

Book Review: New Sight

Fi's Five Favorite Terrifying Children's Stories #5: Grimm's Fairytales

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