Design in the 1970s leaned hard into surrealism - eyes on lighthouses and so on. The cover of A Clockwork Orange I remember finding particularly freaky. Also Saul Bellow's name. How could someone be called Saul Bellow? I imagined him as a bear-like man with a huge beard and flaring nostrils.
The book that obsessed me was a big hardback of Grimms' Fairy Tales. The stories were significantly scarier than the Ladybird versions, and accompanied by beautiful, terrifying illustrations. I vividly remember a picture of the devil in a graveyard, leaping through the air, almost as frightening as the imaginary Saul Bellow.
The Warlock of Firetop Mountain was the first of the Fighting Fantasy series, sword-and-sorcery quests in which the reader was the hero. You had to make decisions and turn to a different page accordingly. A mind-blowing rupture from conventional narrative style, leaving a deep impact on the reader.
The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier is a dark novel about conformity, complicity, and abuse of power - revealing uncomfortable truths about human nature. It resonated with the author as a teenager, being one of the first books that felt like it told the truth.
#childhood-reading #literature-influence #impactful-books #interactive-storytelling #dark-literature
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