The Enid Blyton Society

IceMaiden wrote: I bet if you asked a child today what a Troll was they'd probably reply someone who posts things to deliberately wind people up on Internet sites .

I must admit, when I read your first sentence about 'that's a really creepy troll!' I wondered who you were talking about!! Funny how we soon get re-accustomed to modern names for things. Sad really, as I prefer the original version of a troll!

I had a few books where I always turned the page due to being freaked out by scary illustrations. Another I remember was a really brilliant illustration of a witch in a very thin Dean book of short stories (not Enid Blyton). I still have it somewhere - I'll have to find it and see if it still scares me, lol! Like you, I always dared myself to look at these illustrations with an excited sort of fear!

I do as well, I think you always prefer what you grow up with anyway but it's so confusing when names for things are given completely different meanings to what your accustomed to. To me trolls are ugly troublesome members of the little folk, cookies are biscuits with chocolate chips in them, widgets are found in beer containers and Apple, Blackberry and Orange still conjure up thoughts of fruit before anything else .

I was about to say there wasn't an Enid Blyton book where I was afraid of the illustration but I've just remembered that there is. In the copy I had as a child of the Wishing Chair I was scared stiff of the Snoogle! It would easily have topped my list of scary EB characters purely because of that picture.

Here are the witch illustrations I used to skip because I was almost too scared to look at them!

They weren't from a Dean book as I'd thought, but from a 'Monarch all colour book' of 'Bedtime Stories' - I think they were designed to give kids nightmares!

However, now I've read the story again, I see that actually the witch is meant to be quite friendly!! 'betty' certainly wasn't scared, and even gave the witch her chocolate to eat!

Okay, the illustrations that frightened me the most as a child were from a Dr. Seuss book.

In "The Sneetches and other Stories" there is one story about a pair of trousers ("pants" in Dr. Seuss's American English) that has nobody in them. For some reason the pictures terrified me (as they do the narrator). In the end, the narrator overcomes his fear and makes friends with the trousers, but I was still terrified.

Goodness I can see why you woukd skip those, I would have too! The first one isnt too bad but the second image is, that face is creepy . That is exactly the sort of image that would make me jump violently on coming across it in a book as a child. I would then remember what book it was plus what page and go very carefully through the pages leading up to it incase I'd made a mistake and got another unpleasant fright .

Here's the EB illustration I found scary:

The Snoogle


And I wasn't too keen to come across this chap either. I think it's the eyebrows: