When I was a child, I read two or three of the Oz books. I remember very little about them, and in fact when I think of them now it's with some degree of uneasiness. Part of this is because this was really the first series that I recall of which I stopped reading with more books to go. This troubled me as a child, for some reason. The second reason is probably in fact the cause of the first, and that is that they are goddamned disturbing.

Now I must have enjoyed them to some degree. I was very young at the time, because my memories of it are so fuzzy, maybe six or seven. So if I hadn't enjoyed them I suspect I would have just stopped reading them.

You know how Dahl books are sort of disturbing when you read them as an adult, because adults are dumb? These were not disturbing in that way. These were honest to god, wtf, plain messed up.

Wizard of Oz was bad enough to start with. You had a man made of tin - now they don't explain this in the movie, at least not that I recall... but the man made of tin is actually made of tin because a witch enchanted his axe, and he systematically cut off pieces of his body. I mean, he cut off his leg, in the middle of the forest, and then a tinsmith came along and made him a new one. This happened for all his appendages, and then his head, and then he impaled himself on the damn axe. Then there was the wizard himself, who's a lot spookier in the book for some reason. I mean I knew reading it that he was a nice old man really, because I'd seen the movie. It still took me ages to muster the courage to read it through properly.

But it sort of gets worse. I had to look these books up because I couldn't remember what parts were in which book, or the titles, just that I'd read a couple... in the second book, I think, there are people who have no backs. They're just two fronts stuck together, for some reason.

In the third one, you had these people called Wheelers, who didn't have hands and feet. They had wheels instead. And this disturbed the crap outta me for some reason. They were squeaky wheels. And there was a woman who had all these heads. She kept them all in a big fancy cabinet thing. They had different coloured hair and eyes and stuff, and she wore a different one every day. As in, she'd take off her head, put it in the cabinet, and go to sleep, and then get up and choose what head she'd wear that day.

At this point it's possible my childhood self thought "okay, I'm done with this now" and stopped.

Did anyone else read these books? The creepy parts are the only parts I can remember. But I must, theoretically, have enjoyed them.