Once Upon a Time in a Dark and Scary Book: The Messages of Horror Literature for Children

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Contemporary American horror literature for children and young adults has two bold messages for its readers, messages which are often overlooked in analyses of this genre; adults are untrustworthy, unreliable, and often dangerous, and the monster always wins, as he must in order to market the sequel.

Studying this message in the young adult horror series and in the religious horror series for children (Left Behind: the Kids) for the first time, and tracing the unstoppable monster to Seuss’s Cat in the Hat, this book aims to shed new light on the problematic message produced by the combination of marketing and books for contemporary American young readers.