The Monster At The End Of This Book: Starring Lovable, Furry Old Grover (Watch Video)

The Monster at the End of This Book: Starring Lovable, Furry Old Grover is a children’s picture book based on the television series Sesame Street and starring Grover. It was written by series writer and producer Jon Stone and illustrated by Michael Smollin, and originally published by Little Golden Books in 1971. It has since become the all-time best-selling Sesame Street book title and has been cited as a modern classic of children’s literature.

Having read the title page (or, in later editions, the cover) Grover is horrified to learn that there is a monster at the end of the book. He immediately begs the reader not to finish the book, so as to avoid meeting this dreadful scary monster.

Growing increasingly fearful as the reader continues to turn pages and frustrated that they do not seem to realize the terrible danger, Grover resorts to constructing a series of ever-more-elaborate obstacles, such as tying pages together, nailing the page to the next one and finally even laying a brick wall to keep the reader from advancing further. But nothing works (primarily because from the reader’s POV these are simple illustrations, not actual difficulties).

Finally driven to total despair by the reader’s ability to “overcome” the obstacles, Grover makes one last frantic plea to the reader not to turn the final page…

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…Only to discover on that page, in a surprise self-referential plot twist, that the monster in question is none other than Grover himself. He tries to laugh it off, saying he knew it all along—but the reader can see at the end that he is terribly embarrassed.

“How many of you had this book as a child? I know I did and would laugh with delight the whole way through. Then when I had my own children it definitely became a staple of bedtime reading. I can still hear them giggle too as we read it over and over and over again. Such a classic!

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(Source: Wikipedia)