My favourite book as a kid: Green Eggs and Ham by Dr Seuss

Kicking off a series where writers revisit the book they loved most as a child, Sam Leith returns to a ‘sinister’ classic

‘Say! In the dark? Here in the dark? Would you, could you, in the dark?” Dr Seuss’s masterpiece – among his many masterpieces – is Green Eggs and Ham. It transfixed me as a child and it transfixes me now as I read it to my own children.

Perhaps the most haunting passage in it comes with those words. This demented little creature, desperate to press his unappetising brunch on the grouchy protagonist, is in a car, on a train, and that train is now hurtling through a distinctly cloacal tunnel. The egg-and-ham refuser teeters backwards on the bonnet of the car, retreating from the proffered plate. And those words: the cadence of them, the sinister whisper: here in the dark. It could be the strapline for a serial-killer movie starring Morgan Freeman, and here it is in the middle of a zany children’s book.