The Scary Book ¦ The Slimy Book

Two books together which are similar in many ways. Both are designed to appeal to the 'Yuck' reaction in children, both are written in verse, both have illustrations of horrible fascination, especially to the more robust male element in the class!

It was really the illustrations that made them both so popular. The Scary Book is full of Dracula, fierce dogs, sharks, ghosts and graveyards; The Slimy Book is full of squids, slugs, worms and 'slimy green things straight from Mars'. In both cases the pictures are brilliant, although in quite different styles -- the former being fairly naturalistic, the latter being Babette Cole's eccentric, cartoony sort. Children spent hours looking through the pages of both books. The text seemed almost superfluous.

When they got round to the words, however, it was obvious that Babette Cole was the more successful. Her text was far simpler and the running verse a great help to reading, it flowed and was funny in the way that young children like. The scary book was far more 'grown up' and needed a fair amount of explanation and a lot of help before it was accessible to my readers. Offer the first book to juniors, I think, and the second to younger children.