Should she be reading that?

[elfs]

"Dad, what's a concubine?"

This was Yamaraashi-chan's first strange question of the evening. Apparently her big sister gave her the first Xanth book, A Spell For Chameleon, and I have to wonder if it's really the right book for her. There's a scene in there where some demoness is offering herself to the hero, and that's one of the offers she makes. I read her the dictionary description, "A woman who cohabits with an important man."

A little later, she was playing with her stuffed plushes: Silver-- a ragged kitty, Crystal, a cute toy dragon, and Cthulhu. Yes, that Cthulhu. And she asked me, "Dad, what does Cthulhu really look like?"

So I pulled my copy of H.P. Lovecraft's Bloodcurdling Tales of Horror and the Macabre off the bookshelf and read to her the scene where Cthulhu emerges from his pit, judiciously edited. "Everyone was listening still when It lumbered slobberingly into sight and gropingly squeezed Its gelatinous green immensity through the black doorway into the tainted outside air of that poison city of madness. The Thing cannot be described - there is no language for such abysms of shrieking and immemorial lunacy, such eldritch contradictions of all matter, force, and cosmic order. Three men were swept up by the flabby claws before anybody turned."

She said, "That's so cool! I'm gonna read that whole book!"

I wonder if I should let her. Her mother exposed her to a ton of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and other violent fare when she was much younger and Omaha and I have worked hard to recover the kid that was inside her, but there comes a time when one has to accept that kids will read what they want, and literary violence is very different from television violence. And if she learns something-- Goddess knows Lovecraft had a very respectable vocabulary-- maybe that won't such a bad thing.

I can't stop her from reading Spell for Chameleon, she's halfway through it. It's a heck of a step up from the Magic Treehouse or Droon series. But... should I let the almost-ten-year-old start reading, uh, Lovecraft?

Comments

[blaisepascal]

I've never read the Xanth books (maybe one or two, maybe, but if I did I didn't find them memorable), but I've liked some of his other work. My 10th summer was a strange one for reading. My father "assigned" me SiaSL and Gödel, Escher, Bach as reading material then. I think he wanted someone to explain the latter to him. I didn't find out until much later that my middle name (Michael) came from SiaSL.