Publishers Tap A New Market With Stories That Make Pre-Pubescent Reading A Sick Pleasure. By Warren St. John FIRST THERE WAS Mad magazine and later came Pee Wee's Playhouse and The Simpsons. Now, naughtiest of all, there is Barf-O-Rama--a series of books that'll surely delight kids and probably make their parents shudder. With its emphasis on scatology for scatology's sake, the series won't be winning any Caldecott awards. So far, 10 Barf-O-Rama books have appeared in print, with titles like The Great Puke-Off, Pig Breath, Dog Doo Afternoon and The Legend of Bigfart. Seven more are due out in coming months. The books deal with "a helmet full of hurl," "fettuccine al farto" and "buttwurst." If these books have any redeeming value, it's that they'll keep little Timmy turning the pages of an actual book, rather than zoning out in front of the VCR. The series is the brainchild of Ann Brashares, a very mild 29-year-old editor at the Daniel Weiss Associates literary agency. When Brashares talks about Barf-O-Rama, what she's really talking about are boogers, "scab pie" and even "balloons filled with diaper gravy." This may not be the high-minded stuff that nudged this soft-spoken Barnard College graduate toward a career in publishing. But still, for Brashares, Barf-O-Rama represents the fulfillment of a dream. "For a long time," she said, "I'd been thinking about doing something gross." There are no whoopee cushions or fake vomit lying around her office. And she looked civilized enough, in her freshly pressed brown pantsuit--she looked certifiably corporate. Photographs of her husband and baby graced the walls. So how did someone so professional conceive of something as unapologetically disgusting as Barf-O-Rama? "I grew up with three brothers," she said. "They're capable of gross things. They find gross things funnier than anything else." But as a businesswoman, Brashares entered the gross-out game with a real purpose: Barf-O-Rama, she explained, is all about marketing--trying to target that elusive group of boys on the verge of adolescence. The books, with their lurid covers--a baby whose diaper is about to explode, a kid gagging on a roach-filled burrito--hardly look like they'd pass parental muster. Therein lies the allure. According to Brashares, "It's a famous problem that you can't sell books to boys." The Scholastic company's insanely popular Goosebumps series of light horror has certainly won over this readership in recent years; Brashares thought she'd go Goosebumps one better. "I thought, 'What if I do something about food? Or gross food?' " She developed a proposal for a book about a group of kids who get into a "gross-out war," which she called "The Great Puke-Off." She ran her idea by executives at Bantam Doubleday Dell. (Her company, Daniel Weiss, comes up with book ideas, packages them with writers and then sells them to publishers, much as Hollywood producers sell to studios.) Bantam Doubleday Dell was "reluctantly interested," she said. Then Brashares called on an old friend, Katherine Applegate, who's the Thomas Pynchon of juvenile fiction; her publisher claims to have never laid eyes on her, and she shuns interviews. She writes out of Minnesota under the pseudonym of Pat Pollari, a gender and ethnically neutral name conceived, ironically enough, so as not to offend. She gets paid a few thousand dollars per manuscript. Applegate, who Brashares describes as "somewhere in her 30s," agreed to give The Great Puke-Off a try. Applegate turned in something so outrageously disgusting the publishers had to take note. "When the first manuscript came in," Brashares recalled, "They thought it was wow. It was new and shocking, but in a good way." Here's an excerpt: " 'Aaargh! There are roaches in the food!' Zoner shouted. Allie was the first to blow. Her eyes changed from blue to green behind her glasses. Her throat started doing the gack dance. Then she emitted. She extruded. " 'G-g-g-ouf-bleah!' It was stomach contents everywhere, all over the table and dripping off the sides." In case you don't know what a "gack dance" is, Barf-O-Rama books come with glossaries: "The spasms observable in the throat of a person preparing to gack, blow, heave, hurl or emit." The book also includes a scene in which four kids blow their noses directly into each others' mouths, and it culminates in a "turd war," which is where those "balloons filled with diaper gravy" come in. Bantam Doubleday Dell was disgusted enough to order 16 more books just like it, and the Barf-O-Rama series was born. Now a group of editors and several writers--Team Barf-O-Rama--try to live up to the books' cover-line promise of a "Guaranteed Gross-Out!" Parents might not be proud to have their progeny, quite literally, engrossed in the genre; but if little Timmy doesn't get grossed out by Barf-O-Rama, he may just end up turning elsewhere. Getting in on the disgusting trend is Addison Wesley, with its Grossology series. And there are the gross toys: The Archie McPhee Company in Seattle is selling lots of brain-shaped gelatin molds these days. A company called Brainstorms is moving tons of "Gurglin' Guts Eye Balls," which produce "oozing and sloshing noises" when shaken. These are all noble efforts, but in both scope and degree of the grotesque, Barf-O-Rama takes the cake...and yacks it up right back in your lap. Will this stuff damage a child's mind? Are the Barf-O-Rama books training manuals for a generation of budding marquises de Sade? Not necessarily, said Dr. Norma Doft, a child psychologist at New York University Medical Center: "Everything has to be taken within the framework of who the kid is. For some kids, it's too stimulating; for others, it meets their needs." The appeal of grossness, Doft said, is real. "This titillates kids. It's very naughty and very exciting developmentally. It's more exciting than sex at some ages." But the danger "would be the kid that needs to read all of the books in the series." Even Brashares herself assumes "parents aren't going to want their kids to have 48 Barf-O-Rama books on their shelves." Dear old mother is probably the biggest hurdle standing between Barf-O-Rama and Goosebumps-style success. The real question is whether Mom will fund her children's flashlight-under-the-covers reading program. A survey last year in Publisher's Weekly determined that mothers buy nearly half of all children's books, with teachers buying the next 20 percent. Kids themselves buy between 5 and 15 percent of the books they read, and fathers even fewer than that. To succeed, Barf-O-Rama needs some pretty out-there moms--women who perhaps traded Wacky Packages 15 and 20 years ago or dabbled in Slime. Even so, is it likely they'll want to send their kids to bed with visions of "turd wars" dancing in their heads? "There's resistance from parents," said Brashares. "I can't say I'm surprised at that." Enter the Internet as a way to get around parental censorship. The Barf-O-Rama Web site has generated fan mail from kids eager to share their own gross tales. And the series has found an unexpected market at some college book stores. Brashares is holding out for parents to come around to Barf-O-Rama. She argues the books are an alternative to violent or scary stories. "Nobody gets hurt or killed," she said. "It's just that they're pretty gross." And how. To quote from that potential classic of underground prepubescent literature, The Great Puke-Off: "The two vomit streams hit Mr. Chapman like a firehose. I stood on the seat as the tidal wave of heave rolled by." A version of this article originally appeared in the New York Observer.

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