The boys, Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids, Kenzaburō Ōe, trans. The children in Richard Hughes’ 1929 classic of discomfort, A High Wind in Jamaica, represent more the “banality of evil” style of wrongdoing-except instead of arming themselves with a thin guise of professionalism, à la Eichman and his compatriots, they hide behind the protective armor of childhood, despite the dark consequences of their dangerous childhood games. When it comes to evil children in fiction, they tend to be completely, unquestioningly, 100 percent evil, and happy with their own maniacal natures. The pirates alternate between wanting to exploit the children, preserve their innocence, and abandon them on the nearest island, yet the pirates come out looking more concerned about right and wrong than their gleefully amoral charges. ![]() Along the way, pirates hijack their Dutch freighter, the children climb on board the pirate ship, and the freighter speeds merrily away, unknowingly leaving behind its most precious cargo to run feral in a den of thieves. Two families of children growing up in the West Indies are sent to England by their parents to get a “civilized” education. The children, A High Wind in Jamaica, Richard Hughes When it seems even that might not protect him from the police, he tries to convince Rose to commit suicide-and very nearly succeeds. In order to neutralize her as a threat, Pinkie seduces her into an emotionally abusive relationship, and eventually convinces her to marry him in a civil ceremony, despite the fact that they both consider it a mortal sin. Creepiest of all is the way he manipulates 16-year-old waitress Rose after she witnesses something that could implicate him in one of the murders. ![]() Obsessed with damnation, Pinkie is disgusted by sex and eschews all worldly pleasures, including alcohol-yet despite his fear of sin, he’s able to coldly dispatch enemies and friends alike as soon as they begin to inconvenience him. A temperamental sociopath obsessed with revenge, Pinkie is made even more unnerving by the fire-and-brimstone style Catholicism he practices. Seventeen-year-old Pinkie, most often referred to in the text as merely “the Boy,” becomes the unlikely leader of a small-time Brighton gang after the violent death of his predecessor, Kite. Pinkie Brown, Brighton Rock, Graham Greene Whenever Merricat goes into town for food and books, they taunt her with a disturbing rhyme: “Merricat, said Connie, would you like a cup of tea? / Oh no, said Merricat, you’ll poison me.” Part of Jackson’s genius, however, is to make the surrounding village’s children-whose obsessive interest in the Blackwoods is constantly threatening to break out into violence-similarly sinister, if not as obviously macabre. On Thursdays, her “most powerful day,” she tries on the clothes of her dead relatives. To ward off danger, she maintains superstitious “safeguards” around the Blackwood property-a book nailed to a tree and several buried objects, including coins, marbles, a doll, and even her own baby teeth. As befits a murderous child, Merricat has a number of strange habits. Though Mary Katherine “Merricat” Blackwood is technically an adult when We Have Always Lived in the Castle begins, she was only 12 when she took out four of her immediate family members-parents, brother, and aunt-in one fell swoop via poisoned sugar bowl, a scandal for which her beloved older sister Constance took the fall (though she was ultimately acquitted). ![]() ![]() Merricat, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Shirley Jackson In the end, it’s hard to say who is more frightening: Marina herself or the plurality of orphans who are her ultimate destruction. Fascination turns to love, and love turns to scorn-scorn that only abates during the middle of the night, when Marina leads the children in their game. When seven-year-old Marina arrives at the orphanage, both her parents having been killed in a car accident (“Her father died instantly, her mother in the hospital,” is the book’s increasingly chilling refrain), she instantly becomes an object of fascination for the other girls. (Your kid is great, though.) Of course, some of the creepiest, weirdest, and most fucked-up children can be found in the pages of your favorite books, and to that end, the Lit Hub staff has hereby assembled some of our favorite scary children in literature, from murderous orphans to nightmarish versions of tech-happy millennials to practitioners of sympathetic magic who really wish they were werewolves. Think about it: they’re like regular humans, only tiny, with slightly out-of-proportion heads and T-Rex arms. Let’s face it: children can be pretty scary.
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