By Lemony Snicket
The dark lives in the basement of Laszlo's house, and one night it comes upstairs and says his name.
Laszlo is afraid of the dark. The dark lives in his house, mostly in the basement, and every morning Laszlo opens the basement door and says hello to it, because he figures that if he visits the dark in the daytime it might not visit him at night. Then one night his night-light goes out, and the dark comes to his room and says: Laszlo. It wants to show him something. Laszlo follows it, down the stairs, across the floor, into the basement, all the way to an old chest of drawers, and the dark tells him to look in the bottom drawer. Inside is a box of light bulbs. Laszlo takes one, and after that the dark never bothers him again.
This one goes after the fear directly instead of around it. It takes the dark, makes it a character with a voice, lets it call your child's stand-in downstairs at night, and then reveals that the errand was to hand him a light bulb. The dark isn't beaten and it isn't befriended exactly; it's revealed to have been keeping the light bulbs the whole time. For a four- to seven-year-old with more patience than a toddler, that's a bigger idea than a night-light, and Klassen's enormous black pages make the point without a word: the dark takes up most of the picture, and it's still just the dark.