Terrifying kids novels from the 70s and 80s

[willbo]

I was thinking about some of the terrifying books we had around in primary and secondary school. I don't know if anyone remembers one about kids putting on the Sweeny Todd musical at school and they start getting possessed by the character of Todd somehow. And there were loads about nuclear wastelands. I remember one that was just about the life of a family with radiation poisoning living in a wasteland. And the novel "Gulf" about an English boy being possessed by a boy from Iraq.

I've got a memory of a kids book about an evil teacher - like a Trunchbull type from a Roald Dahl novel - but she was like mentally manipulating and dominating everyone and the other teachers. I can't even remember what else happened in it, but I remember it being really disturbing, and I'm sure I read it in primary school

[Rizla]

There was an incredible collection of short sci-fi/horror stories by Nicholas Fisk, "Sweets From A Stranger" that I read and re-read, every story is still seared into my mind. The title especially, which played on the stranger danger theme to brilliantly creepy effect - a young girl is abducted by a bloke in a car, but he's actually an alien, which she's aware of as it's happening but she's both powerless to stop herself and almost pities him in his seeming ineptitude in his mission. Ends up imprisoned on a strange planet with a bunch of other people, all strangely listless and resigned to the fact that no rescue will be forthcoming anytime soon, but she somehow escapes and tries to get some child aliens to help her, but they just giggle and run away, because everyone knows you should never talk to strangers...

[thecuriousorange]

What was the eighties British kids book about a boy whose computer becomes sentient and he ends up playing a real-life videogame?

[willbo]

Terry Pratchett's only you can save mankind? Pretty disturbing surreal novel IMO even by his usual Discworld standards

[studpuppet]

What was the eighties British kids book about a boy whose computer becomes sentient and he ends up playing a real-life videogame?

Sounds familiar - this isn't it, but...

[willbo]

does anyone remember the novel The Wave about a fascist type group sweeping a school?

I have this memory of a kids book. It had a Trunchbull/Umbridge type dominant, bullying female teacher. She's loud and shouts a lot I suppose. At the end of the book she's defeated in some non-violent way - someone stands up to her and reveals that she has lost her power in some way, maybe her job is in danger or something. And all she can say is "goodness". After yelling for the whole novel, she can only softly repeat "goodness..." because she's in so much shock. I wish I could remember in what novel this scene takes place. It could have been a fantasy novel or one of the "Marmalade and Rufus" books or anything.

[Famous Mortimer]

"Brother In The Land" by Robert Swindells

Barrel of laughs about the UK being devastated by nuclear war and some kids trying to survive in the aftermath. They get captured and put in a slave labour camp too!

[famethrowa]

Oh god yes. Why did the literary world of the 70s want to traumatize me so much?

I Am The Cheese - your parents are dead and you're constantly pursued by dark forces. Oh and it's all in your head and you never left the mental hospital.

Bless The Beasts and Children - kids get endlessly bullied and molested at summer camp, eventually escape into the countryside and get shot by rednecks. Great holiday fun!

Z For Zachariah - Hey, it's the nuclear holocaust and you're possibly the only one left, a vulnerable young girl. But, here comes a creepy older man to live with you!

No wonder I don't read books these days.

[Famous Mortimer]

I Am The Cheese - your parents are dead and you're constantly pursued by dark forces. Oh and it's all in your head and you never left the mental hospital.

Also made into a movie with Elliott's brother off of ET as the lead, and they didn't sugarcoat the ending either.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OyCU-qgaejc

[A Hat Like That]

"Brother In The Land" by Robert Swindells

Barrel of laughs about the UK being devastated by nuclear war and some kids trying to survive in the aftermath. They get captured and put in a slave labour camp too!

The Thousand Eyes of Night

Absolute grade-A nope. Remember the use of disused railways/tunnels being very effective.

[Jerzy Bondov]

We read a book in school called Throwaways, about a dystopian future where things have gone to shit, and these kids just get dumped by the side of the road by their parents because they can't afford to look after them. They fall in with some kids in a shanty town who scavenge stuff from the tip. It was quite dark but the really scary thing is the guy who wrote it turned out to be a paedo

[jobotic]

Ian Strachan?

[The Crumb]

Yaxley's Cat by Robert Westall. Family of yuppies go on holiday to darkest Norfolk. Turns out they're staying in the house of the former 'cunning man' (like a witch). The villagers turn increasingly hostile, the family find the cunning man's body buried in the garden and then the locals try to trap them in the house and burn them to death.

The Machine Gunners is pretty gothic looking back, as well. Pretty sure the 'happy ending' for two characters is getting shipped off to borstal together.

[QDRPHNC]

Not a novel, but my parents had this book that my sister and I must have read at least once a week for the entirety of our childhoods. For Christmas this year, she located a used copy and sent it over, blew my mind how I could remember every single page, every image dredged up memories long since packed away at the back of the cupboard.

Plenty of very creepy and weird "true" stories in here, many I've never seen anywhere else and more than a few that shit me right up when I was a kid. The illustrations are so odd, like those of other kids books of the 70s that you would find in any school, but just weird and uncanny. Like this:



And I'll leave you with one of the stories in this KIDS BOOK:

Spoiler alert

The gruesome story of the Wild Hunt - of the onlooker who cried out to the huntsmen as they rode by, "Give me some of your game!" "Take this," said the huntsman, tossing him an ice-cold bundle. He rode off followed by the howling hounds. When the unfortunate man opened the bundle he found his own baby, dead inside.

Needless to say this story is illustrated.

[close]

[Psybro]

There was an incredible collection of short sci-fi/horror stories by Nicholas Fisk, "Sweets From A Stranger" that I read and re-read, every story is still seared into my mind.

Nicholas Fisk's 'Grinny' was shit scary. About a mysterious granny who never existed before coming to stay with a family, and plays on the whole oblivious brainwashed parents trope. There's one particular scene where they spot Grinny lying in bed at night with her eyes wide open with light shining out and her mouth babbling machine signals.

Turns out they did an animated adaptation for Canadian TV where they neutered the tone.

[Glebe]

Nicholas Fisk's 'Grinny' was shit scary. About a mysterious granny who never existed before coming to stay with a family, and plays on the whole oblivious brainwashed parents trope. There's one particular scene where they spot Grinny lying in bed at night with her eyes wide open with light shining out and her mouth babbling machine signals.

I think I borrowed that from the library as a wee lad but never actually read it. Cover was enough to put the shits up you in any case.

[willbo]

Grinny totally screwed me up! I used to constantly imagine new scary sequels for it in my head. Also the Demon Headmaster books, but I didn't think they were worth mentioning as the various series were all over TV through the 90s which kind of neutered them a bit.

[Ron Maels Moustache]

Had this book out of the library as a kid. The first story in it was called "In A Dark, Dark Box..." and it properly fucked me up. It's about a young lad being told a bedtime story by his grandmother, (it's the old poem that goes "In a dark, dark wood, there was a dark, dark house..." etc). As she's reading, more and more spooky shit keeps happening, mirroring the words in the poem, and it becomes apparent that the boy is somehow in the story. There's also something about the boy's father being a sailor who drowned at sea, so of course, guess who comes visiting...

The whole thing has a kind-of unresolved nightmarish quality to it, it just left you with the sense that the boy was still trapped in the story and there wasn't any end to it. Even his dear old granny is all part of it. I think it was so unsettling because it plays against the comforting notion you have when you read scary stories as a child, where you tell yourself that it can't hurt you as it's just a story. Because in this story the boy is told just that, but he doubts that's true, so maybe the story you're reading now could be the same. A pretty disturbing idea to put in a child's head.

Last year I found out there was a TV adaptation of the same story made as part of the Dramarama strand, and it just bought it all back again. It's a really well done adaptation too, if I'd seen this as a kid I'd have probably never slept again.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-qCIWhdGRw

[Psybro]

Just noticed that Swindells was mentioned upthread, a recent stay in a guesthouse on the West Cliff in Whitby was exciting for me as that was the precise setting for 'Room 13'. An effective tribute to Whitby's Dracula lore with a top floor broom cupboard which turns into Room 13 at the stroke of midnight and lures in a child.

The nuclear apocalypse stuff makes a cameo when the school coach passes RAF Flyingdales on the way up.  I distinctly remember Radio 4 airing an adaptation but have struggles to find evidence for it, but it lost some of the creepiness it has on the page.

[Jerzy Bondov]

Ian Strachan?

That's him. The filth found bad paedo stuff on his pc and he had a go at the classic "research" defence but it didn't work out.

Grinny sounds amazing

[willbo]

I guess the idea is that in the '50s, their children's books (and culture in general) weren't allowed to mention the war, abuse, etc, they had to repress that and be jolly and upbeat, so they were making up for it by writing honest and open stuff for the next generation. But maybe they went a bit too far in the extreme once they got a taste for scaring us kids.

[Glebe]

I guess the idea is that in the '50s, their children's books (and culture in general) weren't allowed to mention the war

[Rizla]

...speaking of the war - did anyone read Conrad's War by Andrew Davies? Not exactly nightmarish as such, but a superb novel about a WW2-obsessed lad who gets timeslipped into his own badly glued-together airfix lancaster bomber with his depressed TV-writer dad on a bombing raid, then captured by jerry and forced to confront the humdrum reality and misery of armed conflict. Almost a kid's version of Slaughterhouse 5, very funny, as you'd expect from the writer of the Marmalade Atkins books (and numerous TV adaptations including the mighty House Of Cards - whenever I watch a Play For Today I'm reminded of the dad character, who, according to Conrad, seemed to spend all his time either on the toilet, or churning out endless TV plays about nurses crying in rooms with water pouring down the walls).

[MojoJojo]

"Brother In The Land" by Robert Swindells

Barrel of laughs about the UK being devastated by nuclear war and some kids trying to survive in the aftermath. They get captured and put in a slave labour camp too!

We did that in school.

Don't know if it counts as as terrifying or not, but the Duncton Wood books like a mole based rip off of Watership Down. But it's has a lot more rape, forced sodomy and necrophilia in it than Watership Down.

[A Hat Like That]

Yaxley's Cat by Robert Westall. Family of yuppies go on holiday to darkest Norfolk. Turns out they're staying in the house of the former 'cunning man' (like a witch). The villagers turn increasingly hostile, the family find the cunning man's body buried in the garden and then the locals try to trap them in the house and burn them to death.

The Machine Gunners is pretty gothic looking back, as well. Pretty sure the 'happy ending' for two characters is getting shipped off to borstal together.

I was stranded for a day in a wind-and-rain-swept youth hostel in the Lakes so read a bunch of Westall books. These were all the books I read when I was 10, 11 ish so I had these glimpses of sentences I remembered vividly.

The Machine Gunners is a great read. The sequel, Fathom Five, while still great, is bleak. The banality of being at war for 4+ years is properly front and centre. Blitzcat is a bit shallower, but has some good sections - certainly around the Coventry bombing and also the randomness of death in war.

He's got a couple of folk horror ones, all set around the wind-swept North East coast. There's a recurring theme of older teenagers working out that adult life is shit.

[A Hat Like That]

does anyone remember the novel The Wave about a fascist type group sweeping a school?

The Wave is based on a real story, iirc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Third_Wave_(experiment)

Guess what I'm more interested in is ...

It Can't Happen Here, the 86th book in the Sweet Valley Twins series, features a substitute teacher who conducts an experiment similar to The Third Wave. The title references a novel of the same name.

[badaids]

Not a kids book but I read Salem's Lot when I was about 13 and it scared the shit out of me, couldn't sleep for about two weeks, lying in bed expecting to see a pale face with red eyes at my window.

[willbo]

that Sweeney Todd play novel really screwed me up. It had really vivid descriptions of the meat pies etc. It seems like a lot of these books were about kids being slowly corrupted by something

[The Crumb]

I was stranded for a day in a wind-and-rain-swept youth hostel in the Lakes so read a bunch of Westall books. These were all the books I read when I was 10, 11 ish so I had these glimpses of sentences I remembered vividly.

The Machine Gunners is a great read. The sequel, Fathom Five, while still great, is bleak. The banality of being at war for 4+ years is properly front and centre. Blitzcat is a bit shallower, but has some good sections - certainly around the Coventry bombing and also the randomness of death in war.

He's got a couple of folk horror ones, all set around the wind-swept North East coast. There's a recurring theme of older teenagers working out that adult life is shit.

My favourite of his growing up was Cats of Seroster, a pretty barmy story about someone in medieval France getting roped into becoming the reincarnation of an Egyptian mystical warrior aligned with some magical golden cats. Thinking back even that had some pretty horrible sections, including harrowing scene where a city of people try to murder all the cats they can.

[Kankurette]

Nicholas Fisk's 'Grinny' was shit scary. About a mysterious granny who never existed before coming to stay with a family, and plays on the whole oblivious brainwashed parents trope. There's one particular scene where they spot Grinny lying in bed at night with her eyes wide open with light shining out and her mouth babbling machine signals.

Turns out they did an animated adaptation for Canadian TV where they neutered the tone.

Oh Christ, I remember Grinny. We had to read it in English class in Year 7.

The Animals of Farthing Wood books were written in the '80s and they're not quite Watership Down levels of horror, but they come close. Like the serial killer wildcat who kills one of Fox's descendants by dropping him from a tree, or Adder's girlfriend being murdered by a pack of rats, or Badger's descent into dementia.