One is tempted to respond with a flourish of neo-Seussian neologisms to Ann Hulbert's not-bad analysis of how the Cat in the Hat ushered in a reign of monitored, it's-fun-yet-also-healthy reading for kids.

But only tempted -- I lost all of my desire to Geisel when I beheld the title of the spin-off to the shark-jumpery of Oh, the Places You'll Go. The up-with-fuzzy-footed-people attitude of the first one was cloying, but after all of the disturbing whimsy of his other books, you could forgive Dr. Seuss a little bit of treacle. He'd earned it, and then some. But the combo of bad meter and a catchily irritating triple rhyme in title to the sequel -- ouch.

What Hulbert's discussion of the Cat's cultural iconicity raises for me -- besides my codgerly response to those two late-career books -- is some thought about something that really has little to do with her larger argument (suckers! You thought I had something to say about the article I linked to? When, when will you learn?), and more about my own response to the Dr. Seuss canon, which is one which I rarely catch a glimpse of in the writing of the many thoughtful people who have discussed their young experience reading the Geiselian oevre.

That response in a nutshell: I don't like him, and I never did.

Now, just a minute. This is going to require some explanation. Seuss was a thoroughgoing genius. Not many artists in any medium create an instantly recognizable style, iterated and developed so completely that a whole subcategory of visual expression gets more or less subsumed in it. Modern dreamscapes either avoid Seuss or imitate him. And although his range was more limited as a writer, the frenetically dextrous play with phonemes and near-phonemes that was his stock in trade made somebody like Ogden Nash look fussy and dilletantish by comparison (OK, that last is unfair: I'll probably retract that in the morning, but just let it pass for now, wouldja?).

No, I mean to shortchange neither the brilliance nor the prolific energy with which that brilliance got refined and put between covers.

What I mean is this: my memories of Seuss's books are not particularly happy or nice ones. Those color-saturated skies. Those tumorish houses and trees sprouting hairy tufts and tentacular branches. Those floppy, flipperish feet and upturned snouts on the faces of various Everybeings. Holes in the ground which disgorge grinning foes and lurkers of all kinds. A dreamland indeed -- as far as I was concerned a fever-dreamland. Was I fascinated? Absolutely, particularly by some of the more Rube Goldberg arrangements Seuss staged (I believe that in The Sleep Book there's a particularly engaging mechanism used for tallying up the current global total of snoozers).

But even as a child, I viewed Seuss with a degree of suspiscion, which has not quite left me to this day. His books, to a one, have overtones which if not sinister, at least resonate in harmonies not entirely easily resolved. The melancholy of the faceless Once-ler is not merely didactic -- it's chillingly existential. The Lorax's forest carried doom in its saplings. Going on beyond Zebra is not for the faint of heart. The Cat in the Hat is a classic trickster demigod, and mortals as a bunch do not come out ahead in encounters with his peers. The Grinch has been dislocated by Chuck Jones (to say nothing of Jim Carrey) from his original Seussian context, and so can't really apply here. But I even find The Foot Book a little creepy. "Here come Clown Feet" is not a statement that ought to bring an unambiguous smile to anyone's face.

I don't suggest this is a flaw, nor do I mean to imply that books for children should not contain the power to disturb the imagination. Seuss is worthy of his status. But when I encounter yet again an adult who remembers reading his books with an uncomplicated fondness, I wonder: does anyone else in this world remember their smaller selves, at bedtime, trying rather diligently not to think about that goddamned nightmare road to Solla Sollew.

Or is it just me?