'It Has Killing In It'

What was the first piece of media you consumed which 'had killing in it'? 

I ask because a certain girl I happen to know has recently been reading the Warriors or Warrior Cats series at bedtime. For those who don't know it - and I should stress I know almost nothing about it - it seems to be a sort of cross between Redwall, Harry Potter and Rainbow Magic. A coterie of authors writes the novels and they involve, well, warrior cats doing, er, warrior cat things. There are clans to which the characters all seem to belong, and the plot of the first book appears to involve a Muggle housecat who runs away from home and finds a new one with his wizard warrior compadres. There is not, I should make clear, a 'sorting collar' and the clans are not called Gryffinpuss, Slithermiaow, Hufflepurr, or Kittyclaw. 

Readers familiar with the books will be able to tell me if they are dreadful doggerel or surprisingly good, or somewhere in between. But what this post really occasioned was my daughter's remark, made to me last night, that she feels the books are very advanced because they 'have killing in them'.

I took this to mean that violent death is a feature of the books. And I reflected that she was probably right. There is 'killing' in Harry Potter. But most of the material she will have read up to this point, including things like Dork Diaries, Diary of a Wimpy Kid, Lottie Brooks etc., will have been fairly milquetoast. There won't have been a lot of jeopardy or high drama. 

This set me off reminiscing about being a child. I think I too had this conception in my mind that there was a distinction to be drawn between kids' entertainment and that for adults, with 'having killing in' being an important aspect of the difference. The type of books I was reading at the local library aged 7 or 8 or so would not I think have had killing in them. But then I got onto The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, the Fighting Fantasy books, and so on, and this felt like a major watershed moment. Suddenly I was reading books in which people killed each other. I was a big boy, now.

What is curious about this is that the young child appears to have in his or her mind, even from toddlership, an idea that 'having killing in it' is a distinct category from fairy tale death. Fairy tales have death in. Admittedly many fairy tales are Bowdlerised these days to an absurd degree - the three little pigs befriend the wolf and teach him how to be a vegetarian, etc. - but you can still find versions in which characters are eaten, drowned, burned and so on. Yet children appear to be able to separate fairy tale death from acts of actual killing in their minds. It is only when one graduates to books that have killing in them that one has move beyond the fairy tale, which concerns death and yet which at the same time somehow doesn't.

I can't remember the exact moment I first encountered a book with killing in it, but I am fairly sure that it was The Hobbit, and I can vaguely remember the thrill it gave me when I realised that the cartoon violence with which I was familiar had been superseded by something much more serious and grand. This the point in a life in which one puts away childish things and starts reading The Warlock of Firetop Mountain. A Rubicon has been crossed and there is no going back.