"It's an understandable impulse," Deborah Stevenson, the director of the Center for Children's Books at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, says. "We want to protect kids."In The Squickerwonkers, actress Evangeline Lilly tries to break the pattern. The book, out Tuesday, is the first in her debut children's series about the adventures of a motley crew of marionette-like beings, each representing a vice: There’s Papa the Proud, Mama the Mean, Andy the Arrogant, and six other members of the Squickerwonkers family.And these guys are creepy. They’re button-eyed and bursting at the seams. The lone human character, the protagonist Selma, isn’t any better. She looks like a wide-eyed little girl, but her appearance is unnatural, adding to the book’s sinister aesthetic. Lilly’s story is just as eerie: It begins with Selma entering an abandoned wagon before meeting each of the Squickerwonkers. Soon after their introduction, they pop her balloon, and turn her into one of their own, complete with button eyes and strings holding her up—a thoroughly upsetting ending. But that’s just fine by Lilly.“There’s been a trend for a very long time where children’s storybooks are very careful and very meek and have to have happy endings, but those happy endings are only for good people,” she tells me. “The world isn’t that simple.”
Dark children’s stories aren't new (think Neil Gaiman, Lemony Snicket, or Roald Dahl), but the past few months have seen a resurgence in telling tales for children that blend pure horror with age-appropriate themes. Lilly’s book mixes creepy characters with lighthearted language (the book is written in limericks). September’s The Boxtrolls, based on Alan Snow’s Here Be Monsters!, used cartoonish character design to offset the fact that the plot follows an orphaned boy who lives with underground “monsters.” And October’s Guillermo Del Toro-produced The Book of Life—about a man who dies for his beloved—takes place in fantastical settings.Why scare children, though? It’s about helping them deal with and understand their own fears. And that's not easy to do. "The really challenging concept [for authors] is to illustrate the emotions that might be negative," Stevenson says, "like anxiety, grief, and fear.”to know details search our site http://allindiayellowpage.com/.