OK, so this one isn’t a laugh-out-loud side-splitter but it is important to me. I LOVE humour that takes you to unexpected places and what could be more unexpected than an alphabet primer with a body count? Gorey paints it black: a child dies on every page, and while it’s only about 200 words long they’re 200 words of gasp-shock-funny. For me, it was a lesson in how dark you can go with children’s humour. The Gashlycrumb Tinies was a major influence on a book I wrote called How to Cook Children, which was a recipe book for witches using kids as ingredients.