Editor’s Note: A version of the following appeared in the July/August issue of Nurturing Faith Journal (NFJ). Beginning in 2025, NFJ will become Good Faith Magazine and will be available for free to all Good Faith Advocates. Information on becoming a Good Faith Advocate can be found here. 

If you hate spoilers and are unfamiliar with The Monster at the End of This Book, Starring Lovable Furry Old Grover, I encourage you to stop what you are doing and find a copy to read. And if you are under the age of 50 and have never read the book, I would like to express my sympathy.

The classic Little Golden Book featured one of the beloved characters of Sesame Street and led the way in breaking the “fourth wall,” a method in literature and television that would, years later, become a mainstay. Its premise is that Grover, after reading the title of the book he is in and learning a monster will appear at the end, implores the reader to do everything they can to not arrive at the end of the book. 

He begins where we all should begin when we don’t want someone to do something. He asks. “Listen,” he says, “I have an idea. If you don’t turn any pages, we will never get to the end of this book. And that is good, because there is a monster at the end of this book. So please do not turn the page.” 

If the reader refuses his request and turns the page, they discover his rage at what the reader has done. Grover can’t understand why you aren’t as terrified of the monster at the end of the book as he is. So, he resorts to more extreme measures. 

The next section of the story is a variation on the themes found in The Three Little Pigs, with Grover constructing increasingly more difficult barriers to keep the reader from turning the page: rope to tie the pages together, wood planks to nail the book shut, and, finally, brick and mortar to create a wall between him and the end of the book. When all that fails, he resorts to begging. 

But once Grover and the reader arrive at the end of the book, they find comfort rather than terror. It turns out the book’s title was correct. There was a monster, but the monster was Grover himself. 

I have met many people who read this book as children. Only a few of them remember connecting to it on a deep, existential level as I do. I would read the story repeatedly, and continued to read it long after I graduated to more advanced books. I can remember lingering over the pages that Grover had attempted to tie, board, or
wall shut and thinking, “I probably shouldn’t turn the page,” before I turned the page.

Even decades after I first encountered the story, my chest still tightens with a certain intensity just thinking about it. 

It doesn’t take a therapist to figure out that my childhood love, and then obsession, with the book had more to do with anxiety than it did with Grover. Like all great children’s literature (and, for that matter, all great art), the story drilled a hole deep into my experience to excavate what was really going on under the surface. 

Like Grover, I was always fearful of what was around the corner and would develop elaborate plans to stave off whatever lurked in the dark. Those plans were mostly mental, and developing them occupied much of my time. To compound the problem, I was reading another book as a young child that promised the end would be full of monsters. 

The religious tradition I grew up in was as obsessed with the book of Revelation as I was with The Monster at the End of This Book. But unlike the children’s literature I was reading, I assumed the scary things in that book were “really real.” Sadly, there were no adults around to tell me otherwise. 

As an adult, I find it curious that those in the church who are most leery of things like math and the hard sciences, are also the ones most likely to demand that we read the book of Revelation literally. But they are also the ones least likely to be fans of poetry and fiction, which makes it difficult for them to understand the monsters at the end of our book as being anything other than metaphor and allusion. 

This made childhood for those of us who grew up in that world difficult, excruciating even. Compounding these anxieties were the preachers whose livelihoods depended on making us question whether the prayer we prayed was done so with enough sincerity and intention to ensure we didn’t slip into the lake of fire. 

I am old enough to raise an eyebrow at every young person who uses the word “trauma” to refer to something they experienced as a child that was uncomfortable. Still, millennials and those in Generation Z have given us a gift in questioning the acceptability of many of the things that were inflicted on us when we were younger. 

So, even though I can laugh about it, I can say with certainty that the fundamentalist obsession with the “lake of fire” at the end of the book and their insistence on using campfires as opportunities for object lessons were child endangerment. The same goes for their fascination with the beasts spewing sulfur and horsemen swinging scythes.

None of this is to suggest Revelation is off-limits for children. On the contrary. There’s probably no category of human more capable of understanding the true depth and meaning of the book than children. We should actually be letting them lead the way. 

At this point, I probably shouldn’t assume this is old information for you. John’s Apocalypse, which we know of as Revelation, belongs to a genre of literature that largely faded away in antiquity. But there are still remnants of apocalyptic literature peppered throughout what we refer to as “fantasy” and “science fiction.”

And its primarily characteristic is not’ just that it is metaphorical, although it is certainly that. Its true ability to transform lies in who can understand it and for whom understanding is elusive. 

The ancient believers who first received the colorful, majestic, and cryptic letter from John the Revelator would have known exactly what the book was about: God favors the meek, the powerless, and the oppressed. Their end is a hopeful one. To quote Frederick Buechner, a saint who understood children and ancient literature well, “The worst thing is never the last thing.” 

Beuchner offered other instructive words about the advantage children have in understanding the ways of God, in his book Wishful Thinking: “…the people who get into heaven are people who, like children, don’t worry about it too much. They are people who, like children, live with their hands open more than with their fists clenched. They are people who, like children, are so relatively unburdened by preconceptions that if somebody says there’s a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, they are perfectly willing to go take a look for themselves.”

For those compelled to ask, “Are you saying Revelation isn’t true,” I must reply with what all children know in their hearts to be the case, regardless of how literal it was meant to be taken, “Of course it is true.” The monsters at the end of our book reveal to us the same truth that the garden at the beginning of the book did: God is the first and the last, we are his children, and we will be with God in the end. 

And you were so scared.