Writers for young children have a nearly impossible task: to amuse both the kid being read to and the adult doing the reading. Doing one or the other is hard enough, and only a select handful of geniuses can manage both. William Steig is one. His books are silly and sweet, as books for children should be, but they are also unsettling, strange, and sometimes scary. Beauty and dread coexist; there is whimsy, even silliness, but also palpable anxiety, peril, and despair in Steig’s world—or maybe this is just the real world. Despite the jaunty animal protagonists and inexplicable magic, Steig seems to me to be one of the more realist of writers for children.

Steig was, of course, known for his comics and covers for The New Yorker. Roger Angell wrote a Profile of Steig for the magazine, in 1995, which recounts that it was at the urging of his fellow-cartoonist Robert Kraus that Steig turned to children’s books—to make money, Steig claimed. His cartoons for adult readers aren’t funny, exactly: his frantic lines, deadpan observations, and odd juxtapositions amuse, disarm, and confuse. You laugh because you aren’t sure how else to respond. His books for children are better at fulfilling our expectations of the form—they entertain—and yet they are as complex and odd as his cartoons.

Given how good his pictures are, Steig’s flair for diction seems unfair—he was a brilliant writer. (He died in 2003, at the age of ninety-five.) In “Zeke Pippin,” a pig takes to a river raft, just like Huck Finn. “As the red sun rose, the independent Zeke Pippin was drifting down the Hinkaholly River, face-to-face with the wide-open sky.” Steig’s sentences have an unforced, often joyful rhythm. You don’t read books like “Zeke Pippin” or “Spinky Sulks,” a hilarious tale in which a family’s youngest son holds a grudge for an impressively long time; you perform them.

Further Reading More in this series on the power and pleasures of children’s books.

“Brave Irene,” from 1986, is one of the author’s most exhilarating books. It’s also one of his most disturbing, perhaps because the characters are humans. A dressmaker falls ill as she completes a gown for a duchess; her daughter, Irene, volunteers to deliver it, as a snowstorm descends, and Irene has a dark night of the soul. “Even if she could call for help, no one would hear her. Her body shook. Her teeth chattered. Why not freeze to death, she thought, and let all these troubles end. Why not? She was already buried.”

Spoiler alert: Irene does not die, but her ordeal takes up the bulk of the story. You shiver alongside her. Your ankle throbs when Irene twists hers. You can understand that the wind sounds like it’s taunting her. Irene might die, and that Steig states this so plainly is refreshing. When you’re five or seven or nine years old, it’s hard to get adults to tell you the truth about anything.

Steig has a gift for stories that feel like fables or folktales, didactic forms that require a kind of frankness. In “Doctor De Soto,” a mouse dentist must outwit one of his patients, a nattily dressed fox who intends to eat him. Doctor De Soto is at a disadvantage in a society designed for bigger animals, and this is a canny narrative choice. Children can understand De Soto because such is their lot—to be too short to reach the light switch, even if they’re profoundly afraid of the dark. It’s a story that celebrates scrappy thinking—a fine lesson.

There’s a similarly fabulist quality to “The Amazing Bone,” in which Pearl, a pig in a polka-dot bonnet, is beset by pistol-wielding highwaymen. She then meets a fox, who has evil designs of his own: to eat her. “I’m only just beginning to live,” the pig laments. “I don’t want it to end.” It’s a scary book—my younger kid keeps his hands clasped over his ears whenever I read it—with a scary moral: only the lucky survive. Still, my son insists that I read it, because the magic words that the titular talking bone utters—“Yibbam sibibble! Jibrakken sibibble digray!”—are so hilarious. That’s the essence of Steig’s works: laughably absurd but also frightening and violent.

I have not seen the film adaptation of “Shrek!,” and I can’t imagine how Hollywood handles this bizarre little book. Shrek is a monster, not only ugly but cruel. He’s so hideous that people faint at the sight of him. Even lightning and thunder overhead hate him, and hurl themselves at him. He’s also kind of a jerk. But Shrek doesn’t scare his readers; indeed, kids love vile things—boogers, slime, etc. And Steig doesn’t use the ogre to make some point about inner beauty, or redemption, or grace. In the book’s climax, Shrek has to confront his own horrifying visage in a hall of mirrors. “He faced himself, full of rabid self-esteem,” Steig writes, “happier than ever to be exactly what he was.” Shrek even finds true love, and the two live “horribly ever after.” Instead of comeuppance, the bad guy gets a happy ending. But sometimes life works that way.

I’ve come to think of “Rotten Island” as a companion to “Shrek!,” because it’s similarly joyful about awfulness. It’s the story of an island alive with monsters, which prey upon one another ruthlessly, until the sudden appearance of a beautiful flower drives them to utter madness. A near-war ensues and eradicates the populace entirely. “Rotten Island” may or may not carry the unsettling moral that the world is a harsh place but might, possibly, be remade by beauty. It’s a weird book, even by Steig’s standards. Perhaps because it’s without the usual texture of Steig’s pictures, the book feels more like Old Testament parable than bedtime story.

Steig’s best books are not about monsters, but they contain the monstrous: the reality that adults understand we live in, the one we don’t want our children to know about. In “Sylvester and the Magic Pebble,” a donkey hero finds an enchanted stone that grants any wish. He’s holding the powerful thing when he has the fleeting desire to become a rock and is instantly transformed, unable to wish himself back into being. The notion of a trapped consciousness is as terrifying here as it is in Dalton Trumbo’s “Johnny Got His Gun”: “His thoughts began to race like mad,” Steig writes of Sylvester. “He was scared and worried. Being helpless, he felt hopeless.”

In a way, I hate reading this book. It’s simply too scary, not only because of Sylvester’s terrible predicament but because of his parents’ grief over their missing son. “They tried their best to be happy, to go about their usual ways,” Steig writes. “But their usual ways included Sylvester and they were always reminded of him. They were miserable.” I try to read to my sons every night and often barely notice what I’m reading; there are many stories that lull me into a state of waking sleep, whether because they’re calming or simply insubstantial. “Sylvester,” a book that touches on such primal horrors that it makes me feel awake and afraid, is the opposite.