Kid Brain

Abby Hanlon's Dory Fantasmagory series is some of the best children's literature in years.

- GENEVIEVE SMITH

WHEN ABBY HANLON was publishing her first children's book, Ralph Tells a Story, she got a note from the art director: The teeth on her drawings were too pointy. The characters looked like vampires and elves rather than kids. So Hanlon went about rounding the teeth and ears. After she handed in the book, she found herself doodling vampires and elves. If her drawings already looked too elfin, she might as well go with it. Meanwhile, at home, her own children, 5-year-old twins, were growing obsessed with Grimm's Fairy Tales. "They wanted to read the gruesome ones. They liked being scared," she says, slouched on a beanbag chair in the backyard shed, barely wider than a desk, that serves as her writing studio in Park Slope. Her daughter became infatuated with Mrs. Hannigan, the cruel orphanage headmistress in Annie. "That's how I started thinking about Mrs. Gobble Gracker," she says. "Just them gravitating toward the dark and scary and needing that." Mrs. Gobble Gracker is the imaginary villain in what would become Dory Fantasmagory, Hanlon's chapter-book series. She is a 507-year-old woman who drinks coffee and wants to steal Dory, age 6, and make her her baby. She has a tight headmistress bun, a witchy black dress and cape, and, yes, sharp teeth.

Mrs. Gobble Gracker herself is an invention of Dory's older brother and sister, Luke and Violet, who hope to scare Dory into acting more mature. The plan backfires. Instead, Dory decides Mrs. Gobble Gracker is the best game ever, much to the annoyance of her siblings and everyone else. That a criticism-Your drawings don't look right! You're acting like a baby!-can become creative fuel, lit by the real, wacky, often dark imaginations of children, is a lesson at the heart of the series and a pretty decent description of Hanlon's own creative process.