With Father’s Day on the horizon, we consider the top three iconic kid’s tales by the likes of Mr Roald Dahl that now make storytime seem more sinister than sweet.

This weekend, it’s Father’s Day (my first as a father). To coincide with the occasion (Father’s Day, that is), this week’s The Journal is celebrating fatherhood, while MR PORTER is supporting Father And Son Day, a charity initiative that sets out to tackle male cancer (shop from the exclusive fund-raising collection here.

If you’re reading this, then chances are you’re not a recent father. If you were a recent father, you wouldn’t even have time to read the Haynes Manual on fatherhood – this might also be because there isn’t one; despite the opinions of other parents, grandparents who haven’t be near a child since you were one, people on the street who are more than willing to point out where you are going wrong, people writing columns about fatherhood exactly like this one, no one knows what they are doing and everyone is winging it – let alone this column about fatherhood.

Face it, your days with the likes of Mr Jonathan Franzen and Ms Donna Tartt are numbered; for the next couple of years at least, the only books you’ll be leafing through will be a lot shorter in terms of word count but larger in terms of physical height and width (if not girth) and made of paperboard. And you will be reading them over and over (and over) again. Making it all the more apparent just how twisted many children’s books are.

Of course, from the Brothers Grimm onwards, stories for children have always had a sinister edge. But in the age of helicopter parenting, you might find it troubling to learn that it’s not the internet (or even the new high-action, bastardised Peter Rabbit cartoon on CBeebies) that is out to desensitize your offspring, it’s the books you read when you were their age. Here are three that, revisited, tell a very different story:

Written by Mr David McKee (also the creator of the decidedly more colourful Elmer the Patchwork Elephant) and first published in 1980, this is Britain’s typically drab, suburban and downbeat homegrown answer to Mr Maurice Sendak’s Where The Wild Things Are, only here the monster of the piece doesn’t exist as a manifestation of its protagonist’s pent-up boredom, frustration and anger, it is just a monster.

Habitually neglected by both his mother and father, Bernard investigates the mysterious appearance of a purple, furry beast on a mound in the family’s garden. And – in a story arc that foretells the brutal dispatch of leading characters in modern-day series Game Of Thrones – the monster eats Bernard.

Not that Bernard’s parents notice. The monster is given Bernard’s dinner (which I’m surprised he could finish considering he’s just eaten Bernard himself), sat in front of the TV (which in those days only had three channels – barbaric) and then sent to bed. A cautionary tale for both parents and monsters.

Buy Not Now, Bernard (Andersen Press) by Mr David McKee here

Among the eternally terrifying creations of Mr Roald Dahl, the Grand High Witch of The Witches is probably the one that sticks out. But even in his more innocent-seeming output lurks some under-the-radar creepiness. Take The BFG, published in 1982 and soon to find its way onto the big screen, helmed by Mr Steven Spielberg.

The titular colossus of this piece may refrain from eating children (unlike his giant brethren, or indeed the aforementioned Bernard’s tormentor), but that doesn’t stop him from skulking around their homes at night, pervading their dozing heads with a trumpet.

Post-Operation Yewtree, I would question the motives of this flatulent, snozzcumber-guzzling behemoth.

Buy The BFG (Puffin) by Mr Roald Dahl here

Famously one of President George W Bush’s favourite tomes when he was a child (he was 23 and had just graduated from Yale in 1969 when it was first published), Mr Eric Carle’s book should probably be read straight rather than as a parable with any hidden subtext. The caterpillar hatches from an egg, stuffs his cakehole with everything from cherry pie to ice cream to two types of sausage to, yes, cake (even eating a series of holes in the book, which given how much my child loves to scoff paper is asking for trouble), builds himself a chrysalis and emerges two weeks later as a butterfly. Basic entomology, isn’t it. No holes in this plot (other than the actual holes).

But then there is the haunted look of the caterpillar himself – which never changes, no matter how fat it gets – suggesting that whatever you gorge yourself on, you end up an empty, soulless husk. Or in the throes of a stomach ache. (Or a beautiful butterfly! Take your pick.)

For me, the book’s most triumphant of conclusions was ruined by the realisation that the caterpillar’s new transitional lifestyle will prove all too brief – the lifespan of the average adult specimen belonging to the Lepidoptera order is often shorter even than the time the hero of this story spent in its swaddle, which makes you think that the caterpillar could have saved himself a lot of heartache (and stomach ache) by just being fabulous in the first place. That and the fact that in my secondhand edition, after the line “Then he nibbled a hole in the cocoon, pushed his way out and... he was a beautiful butterfly!” someone had scrawled “and died”.

Buy The Very Hungry Caterpillar (Puffin) by Mr Eric Carle here

On a second reading of these classics, maybe you need the darkness with the light – you know, yin and yang and all that. And we read them and all grew up to be stable, well-adjusted adults, right? Right.