Love at first fright: revisiting Usborne's terrifying kids' books
Why do we love being scared? Not of anything real, of course, like a pandemic or the swift, thunderous resurgence of Western fascism. The good fear is the kind we opt into willingly, when we watch a horror film, or ride a rollercoaster. The excited kind of terror we feel, when we know we’re (probably) not in any real danger.
This kind of fear isn’t for everyone. But it’s been theorised that horror films may appeal especially to people with anxiety. The idea being that triggering the fight or flight response in a controlled environment allows us to play with fear, and to get to know it on our own, consenting terms. Like the emotional equivalent of licking a battery. And never is this more electrifying than when you’re a kid.
I can’t remember how old I was, exactly, when I discovered Usborne’s The World of the Unknown series of books. Or, more specifically, a book called The Usborne Guide to the Supernatural World. But I think I was still in single figures, and that the copy I found was my older brother’s. The cover was black, and illustrated with a big, red-eyed, fanged skull. It was probably the most evil-looking thing I’d ever seen. But the cover had nothing on what was inside. A bloody-faced phantom woman (one of the ghosts of Glamis Castle) pointing to a tongueless mouth. A vampire gnawing on his own hands. Or, most terrifying of all to kid and adult me alike, a headless, bonnet-wearing ghost, with a void where her face should be. According to the book, she haunts “a marsh on the east coast of England” and “anyone who gets in her way is swept into a whirlwind that passes behind her.”
The lurid, saturated illustrations of this series imprinted themselves on my developing brain, where they remain, decades later. Sadly, I lost my copy (or my brother’s) of The Usborne Guide to the Supernatural World many years ago. But a lot of pages from the book have been posted online and, when I found the headless bonnet woman, she looked exactly as I remembered. I also felt the same ecstatic rush of dread at seeing her as I had done when I was maybe six or seven.
Although the Usborne compendium of fucked-uppery was originally published in the seventies, I discovered it in the 90s. Which was a superb decade for spooky kids’ stuff. There were the Goosebumps books, and TV series; the show Are You Afraid of the Dark?; films like Hocus Pocus and The Witches. But even with all these more up to date ways to keep myself up at night, the Usborne books held up. Maybe the datedness of the illustrations was actually part of the creep factor. Maybe it was the fact that Usborne was a publisher of non-fiction. These, supposedly, were more than just made up stories. The books were factual, educational; scientific in places.
Either way, those books were like an all-you-can-eat buffet for my imagination. My best friend (a fellow creepy kid) and I would take them to my room and spend hours transfixed by the delicate dance of love and hate, when something simultaneously makes you salivate and pee your pants. We’d allow ourselves to be swept up in the whirlwind that passes behind the bonnet lady. We’d lie awake at night thinking about her, and what may have happened to her head.
Shortly after discovering Supernatural World, I got hold of the Ghosts book from the World of the Unknown series. This one was a little tamer, but still flagrantly messed up.One standout story is that of Gef the “talking mongoose”. This is a reportedly true story from the 1930s, of a family from the Isle of Man, and the mongoose who appeared out of nowhere one day and began scaring the bejesus out of them. Maybe it’s just the unrepentant bizarreness of this story that makes it so unsettling, but kudos – Usborne – for making a mongoose scary. A mongoose.
The Ghosts book from the World of the Unknown series was republished last year, with a foreword by League of Gentlemen and Inside No.9’s Reece Shearsmith. It turns out, growing up in the 70s, the comedy-horror writer/actor was also obsessed with Usborne’s unique brand of vivid, scholastic terror. “I am certain I found this book at just the right age,” he writes, “Its macabre contents stayed with me my whole life. Shaped it, even.” And I’m sure this must ring true with a lot of us who grew up with Ghosts, Supernatural World, and the various other nightmare-fuel Usborne kindly touted.
We tend to worry about the books, shows, etc. we “expose” children to. The suitability of any given content for putty-minded prepubescents is usually a matter of raging debate, sometimes seasoned with a pinch of moral panic. I’m lucky to have grown up with parents who understood the value (and the fun) in being scared. I was exposed to The Usborne Guide to the Supernatural World, and turned out… fine?
Maybe nightmares can be good.