I am surprised by the universality of certain plots, not their details but their feel. Take, for instance, Robert Munsch’s The Dark (1979). (For those who lack access to the smaller kind of humans, or prefer Dr. Seuss, Robert Munsch is a Canadian children’s writer who gained widespread popularity after his book, Love You Forever, became the fourth bestselling children’s book of all time. You may remember Joey Tribbiani reading it on Friends in 2003.) The Dark is a fun tale for kids, with great pictures by Michael Martchenko (not David Carson), but when examined more closely, you can see that the children who love The Dark will probably end up reading horror novels later on in life.
The Dark is about Jule Ann, who is trying to get a cookie from an empty cookie jar. This is hubris, which we all know, from the multitudes of Frankenstein rewrites, is a bad thing. Jule Ann shakes and shakes the jar until a piece of darkness falls out. That piece eats other shadows. It grows larger and larger. Her father picks up the dark and throws it out the door. In a horror story, this would be the first encounter, followed by the protagonist thinking everything is okay, in a fat Stephen King novel around page 100. Of course it isn’t okay. The dark keeps eating more and more shadows, and grows to the size of a hill, before it returns to Jule Ann’s house to rest. This is the terror returning to the site of its original acts of evil. Like Frankenstein’s Adam coming back to his creator and demanding a wife. Jule Ann, like any good horror novel hero, cuts the dark up into pieces (though not with a chainsaw) and throws them back into the jar they came from. The jar is thrown into the garbage truck and all is well. The shadows grow back and the dark never returns. In this last bit of sunshine, only, does Munsch fail as a horror writer.
Read the rest:
I hate I Love you Forever. Just hate it. I worked for several book stores during the 80’s. There was a certain kind of woman ( I’m not really sure what that ‘certain kind’ really was ) who would come into the store, and bee-line for the children’s books. They might be alone, might have a female friend, and they would dive on LOVE YOU FOREVER. And they would would sniffle, SOOOOOOB. For reals, sitting on the floor hugging each other and sharing Kleenex. It got to the point that I hid them in the back. “ Oh, I’ll see if we have any in the back,” then walk with the book straight to the till. That often broke the spell before it started. I don’t know if those that did purchase it sat in the food court sobbing over it or just saved it for home and a having a really good howl and be able to get on with things.