One: Wild Things Maurice Sendak once told me of the furor that followed the publication of his children's book, Where the Wild Things Are. In picture and elementally simple language, the story follows a small boy to bed, and then into his vivid, funny, and sometimes disquieting imagination as the bedroom itself morphs into a terrible woods and frightening creatures appear: the wild things. Many parents and some reviewers were downright upset that small children would see such stuff. They believed it would damage the children, implanting frights and fears in innocent brains, inspiring nightmares. Sleep? Sendak hath murdered sleep. But the book prevailed, Sendak told me, because the book was right.