The Monster at the End of Our Book

 

Editor’s Note: A version of the following first appeared in the July/August 2024 issue of Nurturing Faith Journal, which was the forerunner of Good Faith Magazine, a free quarterly resource for Good Faith Advocates.

If you hate spoilers and are unfamiliar with The Monster at the End of This Book, Starring Lovable Furry Old Grover, I encourage you to stop what you are doing and find a copy to read. And if you are under 50 and have never read the book, I would like to express my sympathy.

The classic Little Golden Book featured one of the beloved characters from Sesame Street and was a literary example of breaking the “fourth wall.” The book’s premise is simple: After reading the title of the book he is in and learning that a monster will appear at the story’s conclusion, Grover implores the reader to do everything possible to avoid reaching the end.

He begins where we all should begin when we are worried: He asks for help.

“Listen,” he says, “I have an idea. If you don’t turn any pages, we will never get to the end of this book. And that is good, because there is a monster at the end of this book. So please do not turn the page.”

If the reader ignores his request and turns the page, they encounter his rage. Grover can’t understand why you aren’t as terrified of the monster as he is, so he escalates his requests.

The next section echoes The Three Little Pigs, with Grover constructing increasingly elaborate barriers to keep the reader from turning the page: rope to tie the pages together, wood planks to nail the book shut, and finally brick and mortar to build a wall between him and the end.

When all of that fails, he resorts to begging.

But when Grover and the reader finally arrive at the end, they find comfort rather than terror. The title was correct. There was a monster—but the monster was Grover himself.

I have met many people who read this book as children, yet only a few remember connecting to it on as deep and existential a level as I did. I read it repeatedly, long after I had graduated to more advanced books. I remember lingering over the pages Grover had tried to tie, board, or wall shut, thinking, “I probably shouldn’t turn the page,” before turning it anyway.

Even decades later, my chest still tightens with a certain intensity just thinking about it.

Monsters Everywhere

It doesn’t take a therapist to recognize that my childhood love—and eventual obsession—with the book was more about anxiety than it was about Grover. Like all great children’s literature (and, for that matter, all great art), the story drilled deep into my experience and exposed what was really going on beneath the surface.

Like Grover, I was always fearful of what was around the corner, developing elaborate plans to stave off whatever lurked in the dark. Those plans were mostly mental, and they occupied much of my time. To compound the problem, I was also reading another book as a child that also promised the end would be full of monsters.

The religious tradition I grew up in was as obsessed with the book of Revelation as I was with The Monster at the End of This Book. But unlike the children’s literature I loved, I assumed the frightening things in Revelation were “really real.” Sadly, no adults were around telling me otherwise.

I find it curious that those in the church who are most wary of math and the hard sciences are often the ones most insistent that we read Revelation literally. They are also the least likely to read poetry and fiction, which makes it difficult for them to understand the monsters at the end of our book as anything other than literal.

For those of us who grew up in that world, childhood could be difficult—excruciating, even. These anxieties were compounded by preachers whose livelihoods depended on making us question whether the prayer we prayed was sincere enough to keep us from slipping into a lake of fire.

I am old enough to raise an eyebrow at every young person who uses the word “trauma” to describe something merely uncomfortable. Still, millennials and those in Generation Z have given us a gift by questioning the acceptability of many things that were inflicted on us when we were young.

So even though I can laugh about it now, I can say with certainty that the fundamentalist obsession with the “lake of fire,” along with their use of campfires as object lessons, amounted to a form of child endangerment. The same goes for their fascination with beasts spewing sulfur and horsemen swinging scythes.

Faith of a Child

None of this is to suggest Revelation is off-limits for children. On the contrary, there may be no group more capable of grasping its depth and meaning. We should let them lead the way.

At this point, I probably shouldn’t assume this is familiar territory for everyone. John’s Apocalypse—what we call the book of Revelation—belongs to a genre that largely faded centuries ago. Yet some of the echoes of that genre remain in what we now call “fantasy” and “science fiction.” Its defining feature is not simply that it is metaphorical, though it certainly is.

Revelation’s real power lies in who can understand it and, perhaps more importantly, who can’t.

The ancient believers who first received John’s vivid, majestic, and cryptic letter would have understood it clearly: God favors the meek, the powerless, and the oppressed. Their end is a hopeful one. To quote Frederick Buechner, “The worst thing is never the last thing.”

Buechner offers further insight in Wishful Thinking: “…the people who get into heaven are people who, like children, don’t worry about it too much. They are people who, like children, live with their hands open more than with their fists clenched. They are people who, like children, are so relatively unburdened by preconceptions that if somebody says there’s a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, they are perfectly willing to go take a look for themselves.”

Some may be compelled to ask, “Are you saying Revelation isn’t true?”

The answer to that question is what all children know to be true in their hearts: regardless of how literally it is meant to be taken, of course it is true. The monsters at the end of our book reveal the same reality as the garden did at the beginning: God is the first and the last, we are God’s children, and we will be with God in the end.

And you were so scared.