As a child growing up in suburban Connecticut, I was fortunate to have many books, but my favorite by far was a chestnut, leather-bound Encyclopaedia Britannica. I spent hours cross-legged on the carpet flipping through each volume, but I remember only the three things I repeatedly returned to: Sylvia Plath, Nostradamus, and Biafra. I read Plath's entry so many times that twenty years later I can still recite some of it verbatim. ¡ÈHorror of childbirth.¡É Self-mutilation. Oven. It was like a nightmare, and I was enraptured. While my own obsessions might have been particularly gloomy, they were no less monstrous than the adult-sanctioned books I owned. In my tiny library sat such classics as ¡ÈThe BFG,¡É by Roald Dahl, in which a girl is plucked from her bed by an ogre, and ¡ÈScary Stories to Tell in the Dark,¡É a veritable catalogue of grotesqueries accompanied by the most spine-tingling drawings I've ever seen. Another favorite was the sunny-covered ¡ÈD'Aulaires' Book of Greek Myths.¡É Though it looked benign, it featured the story of Cronos, who ate and regurgitated his children.

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