The Most Existentially Terrifying Kids’ Book Ever Written

It's Mo Willems' We Are In a Book.

From a piece on Slate...

We are in a Book! is not the first children’s book in which the characters are thrown into tumult when they realize their literary aspect. David Wiesner’s Three Pigs picture book, for example, imagines the little pigs blown out of their fairytale by the big bad wolf, and escaping to another story. We Are in a Book! even subtly pays tribute to the classic of this genre, The Monster at the End of this Book. In that book, a terrified Grover hears there is a monster at the end of the book, only to get to the end and discover that he, Grover, is the monster. (Metafictional medium awareness abounds in adult works, too: In Borges, in the final episode of Moonlighting, and in the movie Stranger Than Fiction, for example.)

Yet We Are in a Book! is far more moving—and terrifying—than you might expect a children’s book to be. It is genuinely freaky in its simple, direct depiction of death. What defines the human consciousness of death?