Kermit the Frog and other terrors: the appeal of scary children's books

A Wisconsin woman wants kids kept away from the popular puppet’s ‘traumatic’ book about poverty, but children crave disturbing stories

We’d go to the library once a week when I was little. While my little sister always chose to take home Anthony Browne’s Gorilla, I would uneasily check to see if a certain title was there. Just looking at the cover frightened me almost too much to bear, but I couldn’t resist doing it. Actually taking it out to read would take months of steeling my courage.

The book was Kevin Crossley-Holland’s The Dead Moon and Other Tales from East Anglia and the Fen Country, illustrated by Shirley Felts. The title story, in which the moon comes down one night to investigate the “things that live in the darkness”, was my object of terror. Looking at the front cover still makes me shudder. The moon, trapped. The witches. God. You can read a bit of it here – I still think it’s brilliant – and look at the front cover they used in the 80s, if you dare.

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