ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the points of interaction between the tradition of strange tales and Chinese children's literature and culture. It focuses on the narratives that recognize motifs of cannibalism, strangeness and the spectrality of the child, using anthropomorphic animals to investigate the alterity of gothic characters and children. The chapter summarizes how a Chinese ghostly sensibility is subject to historical ideological constraints that culminated in various campaigns and debates throughout the twentieth century. It focuses on modern fictional narratives that represent the collective trauma of turbulent socio-historical events in the mid-twentieth century. The chapter considers how representations of gothic characters and children, in a modern Chinese context, complicate the assessment of child-adult, human-nonhuman, normality-monstrosity relationships and the systems of meaning enabling them. It concludes with a discussion of how contemporary gothic stories are interspersed with themes of love, adventure, quest and family relationships to 'deliciously' scare young readers.
