Basically. if you don't know him he's a famous author who wrote children's books in the 70's and 80's; and only now have I realised how dark these books were.
A great example is "Charlie and the chocolate factory" which is about some guy called Willy Wonker who runs a famous chocolate factory (such a British thing to write about) and he makes this publicity stunt where he puts 5 golden tickets into random chocolate bars and whoever gets the tickets gets an exclusive tour around his factory, where nobody except him can go inside as Wily Wonker was paranoid of spies. Sounds pretty harmless, sure there's a couple plot holes but this book is 45 years old so it can be excused.
The first child falls into a chocolate waterfall, gets sucked up a pipe, then had all the chocolate and other crap squeezed from him while some ummpa loompas (fictional creatures who work there who only get payed in food...wait hold on-) sang about how the child is a fatass. The second child stole some chewing gum and inflated like a balloon and had to be rolled out and deflated while the ummpa loompas were singing (they do that a lot.) The third fell into a rubbish dump. The forth got stuck inside a TV and turned tiny: then had to be stretched out so he looked like a 13 foot stick. And the fifth (Charlie) got the factory, but also got stuck inside a lift that went to space. Now imagine if that was a book for adults and Willy Wonker was some kind of child murder (@Xploshi did something similar to this at one point). Not much would have to be changed tbh, just chuck in some blood and swears and there you go.
Another one, which was one of my favourite books when I was 7, was this one called "The Witches" which is about these women who are trying to wipe out children. There's literally a song talking about how they're gonna' drug the sweets and give them to children in a sweet shop so when they go to school the next day they turn into mice. Then the teacher walks in and finds all the mice, kills them all with mouse traps, and reads a book wondering where her students went. How is classified as a children's book!? I guess it's worded and the story is told in a way that children don't really understand it well. But still: how many authors can get away with writing a book about child murders to infant school students*?
And all the books (at least the ones I've read) are like this: the main character's family turns into ducks as karma for shooting ducks for fun, and they almost die, a married couple like to torture monkeys and pour glue onto the tree in their garden to catch birds to eat (at one point 4 boys climbed the tree and got stuck, and the couple were completely fine with wanting to kill them and bake them into a pie, but the boys escaped), a 4 year old girl gets neglected by her family because she likes to read, the head teacher at a primary school** abuses her students and threw one across the playground by her ponytails, and then that 4 year old abuses the head teachers trauma by pulling a trick to make it look like the ghost of a dead relative is talking to her so she'll leave her job, a young boy is forced to work by his aunts after his parents died in front of his eyes a couple years back, the list goes on...
I would genuinely see a film remake where they crank up the violence and say swear words as it just seems so fitting for the books, The only books I can think of which aren't really dark is his 2 autobiographies.
*infant school: age 4-7
**elementary school: age 4-11
