15 Best Dark Fantasy Children's Books Of All Time

The novels on the best dark fantasy Children’s Books list, are more than you can imagine.

The novels on the 15 best dark, creepy, humor/children’s books every kid should read list are beyond your imagination. Generally speaking, when it comes to fantasy, will give people a feeling of “relaxation” and “freedom”.

Indeed, relaxed and free fantasy can be said to be a major feature of two-dimensional creation. But there are also many fantasies to create dark works.

In such works, we can see the protagonist challenge the cruel fate, we can see the fierce battle, and it will also make people think after watching it.

When you think of dark fantasy children’s novels, what do you think of?

Today, I will introduce to you 15 novels on the dark fantasy children’s novel list, which are beyond your imagination.

What are the characteristics of fantasy novels?

The characteristics of fantasy novels are the strongest practical significance, the strongest allegory, and the most profound. Its value lies not in the “phantom”, but in the real life under the “phantom”.

To create fantasy novels, you need enough social experience and life quality. Fantasy novels are usually set in modern times.

Magical realism novels often use the method of paradoxical, paradoxical, and “turning fantasy into reality without losing the truth”. A typical fantasy novel, its distinctive features are the deformation of real-life; adding mysterious, magical, and even bizarre content; with strong social contradictions and political struggle connotations.

If realism is a mirror of society, then magic realism’s approach is likened to a funk mirror of society. Although it is covered with a mysterious shell, it is still about describing the real world. However, it does not adopt realistic methods but uses exaggeration and irony.

Table Of Contents

1. The Graveyard Book

2. The Twits

3. Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark

4. In the Night Kitchen

5. Goosebumps

6. A Monster Calls

7. The Blade Itself

8. Blood Ex Libris

9. Fortune Favors the Cruel

10. Three Dark Crowns

11. Black Annis: Demon Hunter

12. The Pariah

13. The Dragonbone Chair

14. Mexican Gothic

15. Assassin

15 Best Dark Fantasy Children’s Books Of All Time

1. The Graveyard Book

The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman

If you’ve read a lot of the articles on my blog then you will have noticed that over the last sort of two years I started reading Neil Gaiman’s books and then I absolutely fell in love with his books so in addition to this book.

I also have two other Neil Gaiman books on this list and they are ‘Coraline’ and ‘instructions’ which is a picture book.

that’s really lyrical and beautiful by him kicking it off with ‘the graveyard book’. this is a story about a young boy named bod who his name is short for nobody effectively bod’s whole family gets murdered by this scary antagonist whose name is jack and god who’s a teeny tiny little toddler sort of totals out the door by accident and then up the hill and finds refuge in a graveyard and so the ghosts of the graveyard let him in and they end up protecting him from this antagonistic murderous figure.

but overall a beautiful middle-grade story I love this so incredibly much and I think it is a beautiful brilliant book.

2. The Twits

The Twits by Roald Dahl and Quentin Blake

If a person has ugly thoughts, it begins to show on the face. And when that person has ugly thoughts every day, every week, every year, the face gets uglier and uglier until it gets so ugly you can hardly bear to look at it. Intertwined old man and old lady.

Mr. and Mrs. Twit are the smelliest, nastiest, ugliest people in the world. They hate everything — except playing mean jokes on each other, catching innocent birds to put in their Bird Pies, and making their caged monkeys, the Muggle-Wumps, stand on their heads all day. But the Muggle-Wumps have had enough. They don’t just want out, they want revenge.

3. Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark

Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark by Alvin Schwartz and Stephen Gammell

For the past two weeks, I’ve been reading those scary stories on my iPad with the quilt over my head every night. Reading Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark was a novelty experience for me because I haven’t read ghost stories in a long time since I grew up. The book is split up into five different sections, they are jump stories, stories with true ghosts, stories about all kinds of things, danger stories, and humorous stories. I really enjoy reading them.

One of my favorite stories in this book is Cold as Clay, which belongs to the stories with true ghosts. I like it because it’s romantic. This is a story of that two people in love who were separated by the girl’s father, and the boy got sick and then died of a broken heart.

However, the girl did not know this. One day, the boy came on his best horse to get the girl home. The boy’s head was as cold as clay so the girl wrapped her handkerchief around the boy’s head, which sets the stage for the coming scary point. They went home but the boy was gone.

The girl’s father told her the truth, and later, they opened the boy’s grave and around the corpse’s head, they saw the girl’s handkerchief. For me, the plot was so moving that I forgot it was a horror story.

Not only is the prose terrifying, but the illustrations that go along with the stories are also terrifying. The illustrations were curated by illustrator Stephen Gamaliel. All of the drawings are in black and white, adding to the suspense of the stories. One of the illustrations that I remembered was one that accompanied the story “The Big Toe”.

The photo is of a weird-looking boy who holds a shovel that was longer than his height, staring at a giant finger that grew out from the ground. This picture impressed me so much that even though I closed my eyes, I can see it and hear the groaning “Where is my to-ooooe?”

One story that is particularly interesting is “The Ghost with the Bloody Fingers”. The story took place in a haunted room in a hotel where the ghost hid in the closet. One day, a man took the haunted room, when he began to play his guitar, the ghost appeared and moaned “Bloody fingers! Bloody fingers!”. Ordinary people probably would have been scared off.

However, the man paid no attention to it, he just kept strumming his guitar. The ghost kept moaning, and its fingers kept bleeding. Finally, the guitar player looked up. “Cool it, man! Get yourself a Band-Aid”. What a humorous man! what an interesting story!

The back of the book reads, “ Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark is an ageless collection of chillingly scary tales and legends. Read if you dare!”

Although I’m an adult now and reading these stories doesn’t scare me so much, I still enjoy reading these stories very much. Halloween is coming. In this spooky season, I think maybe it’s the time to scare my friends off by telling these stories to them, “Where is my to-ooooe?”.

4. In the Night Kitchen

In the Night Kitchen by Maurice Sendak

A young boy named Mickey sleeps in his bed when he is disturbed by noise on a lower floor. Suddenly, he begins to float, and loses all of his clothes as he drifts into a surreal world called the “Night Kitchen”.

He falls naked into a giant mixing pot that contains the batter for the “morning cake”. While Mickey is buried in the mass, three identical bakers (who closely resemble Oliver Hardy) mix the batter and prepare it for baking, unaware (or unconcerned ) that there is a little boy inside. Just before the baking pan is placed into the oven, the boy emerges from the pan, protesting that he is not the batter’s milk.

To make up for the baking ingredient deficiency, Mickey (now covered in batter from the neck down) constructs an airplane out of bread dough so he can use the measuring cup as a hat and fly to the mouth of a giant milk bottle. Upon reaching the bottle’s opening, he dives in and briefly revels in the liquid.

After his covering of batter disintegrates, making him naked again, he pours the needed milk in a cascade down to the bakers who joyfully finish making their morning cake.

With dawn breaking, the naked Mickey crows like a rooster and slides down the side of the bottle, back into his bed, where he has magically clothed again, “cake free and dried”.

This is a book that adults will only give 2–3 stars when they read it for the first time, and children who read it will definitely give it 5 stars.

5. Goosebumps

Goosebumps by R. L. Stine

Goosebumps is a series of children’s horror fiction novellas created and authored by RL Stine. Sixty-two books were published under the Goosebumps umbrella title from 1992 to 1997.

6. A Monster Calls

A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness and Jim Kay

This is a sad book. But it tells a story of overcoming grief.

The demon showed up at midnight as always, calling the boy’s name from under the yew tree in the cemetery.

But the boy is not afraid of the devil, because he is already facing a fact that is more terrifying than the devil, his favorite mother is stepping into the shadow of death day by day.

He doesn’t want to live with his eccentric grandmother, and his school days are bleak — he has to endure both bullying from his classmates and exaggerated sympathy from his teachers.

No, he doesn’t want that. He wants to run away. Escape completely from this world. But then the devil appeared. He was summoned by the boy unintentionally, to exchange three stories for one story belonging to the boy.

But it’s not just a story. This is a very dangerous truth, and it is the most vulnerable fear at the bottom of my heart.

Similar to The Book of Lost Things by the talented Irish writer John Connery, A Monster Calls is also a masterpiece about life and loss, it is a fantasy novel, but no fantasy is more real, it’s truly terrifying.

“A Monster Calls” is a novel as well as a picture book. British illustrator Jim Kay’s extraordinary experimental illustrations and words complement each other.

As a result, the book has won awards for both words and illustrations, becoming the only one in the history of publishing to receive awards at the same time.

The only book to receive the Carnegie Award for Literature and the Kate Greenway Award for Illustration. These two awards are the highest awards in the UK book industry (children’s book category).

In addition, “A Monster Calls” is also the best book of the year by the “British Independent”, “Chicago Sun”, “Wall Street Journal”, “Publishers Weekly”, “New York Times” and other journals and magazines.

The author, Patrick Ness, was born in the United States and settled in London, England at the age of 28. He taught creative writing at Oxford University for three years, and his students were often older than the teacher.

He also writes book reviews for the UK’s largest newspapers such as The Times, The Daily Telegraph, The Guardian, and other specialist media. He was a goth in his youth and wrote radio comedies about vampires and other funny gossip.

7. The Blade Itself

The Blade Itself by Joe Abercrombie

When it comes to the setting of Western fantasy novels, warriors and dragons, wizards and castles, dwarf musketeers, pointed-eared elves and the vast magical world always come to mind.

After reading the mages with boundless mana who control lightning and turn clouds and rain, the writing style of fantasy novels that do not easily use magic has gradually entered the mainstream. Such as the well-known “A Song of Ice and Fire” series.

This book is also such a “low magic” fantasy work that is different from the traditional routine. “This is an era where magic is disappearing…” Although this setting abandons the imagination’s exploration of the boundaries of magic, it strengthens the response to real life and the portrayal of human nature.

Therefore, in this work, you can see the embedding of many realistic factors, which also gives readers more space for thinking. While my reading time was fairly fragmented, the fluency of the overall reading experience didn’t suffer as a result.

Compared with the big time and space narrative from the third-person perspective, the POV perspective of this book provides readers with more perspectives to understand the story and saves the trouble of sorting out the big timeline.

Therefore, it naturally creates a very distinct character. characters. The barbarian hero forced to wander in the mountains, the weak and narcissistic young knight, the torturer with legendary experience, the female warrior full of hatred… These characters appear one after another, forming a team to save the world.

Author Joe Acrobi uses his powerful pen to construct a world of kingly fantasy and uses intense action scenes as the main thruster. While the rhythm is steady and progressive, there are plots, murders, and wars running through.

Even though the protagonists are in different environments, they do not give readers a strong sense of separation, but gradually become integrated with the core main line of the story, which is fascinating. The same routine is also useful in the game “Octopian Traveler”.

The only pity is that there is no world view map in this edition of the book, which makes it impossible to reflect where the place is when many place names appear in the book, and there is only a vague concept of its distribution.

Since the author has only read the first volume of the story, I do not fully understand the various foreshadowings in the book: character motives, historical disputes, etc., so the analysis of the plot is left blank for the time being.

I would like to mention two features of this book under the framework of low magic: wonderful descriptions of cold weapon fighting and vivid social portrayals.

The author’s familiarity with the use of cold weapons makes most of the fighting scenes very smooth. Personally, I especially like Logan’s experience of being in the wilderness before he officially met the first mage.

The psychological description of Rogan’s first entry into the United Kingdom is also extremely exciting, using Bayaz’s mouth to say that Adua looks beautiful and rich, but in fact, it is shrouded in shadow: “Behind this high wall, they were shouting and arguing wildly, Biting each other endlessly. Old wounds never scar, they only grow stronger, take root, and ingrain with age.

Fighting between people is always the most popular drama. They’re not like you, Luo Roots. They will greet you with a smile, flatter you, call you brothers and sisters, and give you gifts, but in the end, they will hurt people with arrows. You will find this is a strange place.”

This is not the epitome of prosperous cities in ancient and modern history. One of them? Finally, the book depicts a period of conceptual change: the rise of populism and the disintegration of the old sense of monarchy.

It is in such a process from high magic to low magic that the meaning of fantasy is constantly being rewritten. As the book expresses, after the age of dragons and magic, there will be more poems waiting for us to discover.

8. Blood Ex Libris

Blood Ex Libris by Raven Belasco

It all started when the dark and mysterious stranger showed up at my children’s reading hour. Of course, I noticed him. I’d been single (and bored) for longer than I care to admit. Me, I’m Anushka (Noosh) Rosetti, head librarian.

He turned out to be a vampire. And not just any vampire: Vlad Dracula. Although he goes by another name these days, and he says he’s changed his violent ways. He definitely seemed more of a lover than a fighter. At first.

In a whirlwind of passion and blood-drinking, I made a crucial but impulsive decision: share blood with him a third time, and give up normal human society forever, making my life among the “am’r” — that’s what the vampires call themselves.

The whirlwind just keeps spinning faster. Before I know it, I’m at an am’r summit meeting — and then, abducted by Vlad’s oldest enemy. He’s hoping to use me to undo all of my lover and my new family’s plans to save am’r society from tearing itself apart.

I thought I was just going to archive some ancient books, but somehow I have to keep myself from being used as a pawn by the craziest bad guy ever, escape back to the good guys (and I’m not sure how “good” they really are) across a desert (I don’t even know what country I’m in!) and not be killed in the process. I don’t know how I will survive the next five minutes, never mind saving my beloved’s life, too….

Blood Ex Libris is the first book in a brand new, dark urban fantasy series mixing horror, history, and blood-soaked romance featuring a snarky librarian heroine, a sensual but complex hero in the story of a life that unfolds in unexpected ways from humdrum to death-defying thrills, from Middle America to the middle of an unknown desert, surrounded by sword-fighting, explosions, and the ultimate drama of immortals meeting death.

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