How I Feel About Snakes as Well as Snake Books

The post no one, especially snakes, asked me to write.

I don’t know why I am so afraid of snakes. I remember the first time I felt afraid of one, maybe around age 6 or 7, when I was outside in the backyard with my dad, and he flipped over an old railroad tie he had been using as a border for the garden, and there was a white snake underneath, curved into the shape of an S. It froze, then slithered into the bushes. I sprinted for our screened-in porch.

I don’t know that I had had any kind of close encounter with a snake before then, and the snake didn’t do anything to me.

As my younger sister got older, she became fascinated with reptiles of all kinds, and I remember her being willing to hold a snake at some kind of wildlife encounter. I was not interested.

When I was about 9 years old, we lived in West Virginia. There was a creek in our backyard, and I don’t remember if I ever saw a snake there, but there was another place I would explore with my friends, down near a huge sewage pipe, and we would walk in the underbrush along a little stream. I took a step and something moved under my foot. A snake had been hiding under the leaves, and I had disturbed it. Once again, it did not hurt me or even touch me, but I don’t remember ever going down in that underbrush again.

I think it was after this point that I subconsciously began categorizing areas as “snake zones.” I didn’t call it this until I was in my mid-30s, but all outdoor areas from then on were one of two places: a place that could have snakes and a place where I didn’t have to worry about snakes.

Unfortunately, I know enough now to know that almost all outdoor places have snakes. However, I also know that most snakes don’t want to have anything to do with me. And so I have adjusted that category into “places where I might accidentally encounter a snake even though the snake doesn’t want to hurt me.” This applies to all places with high grass. Anywhere around bodies of fresh water. Old houses or sheds. There are a lot of snake zones.

I hate that my fear of snakes is such a key aspect of my personality, but it has proven virtually impossible to change. I’ve even attempted to do exposure therapy on myself, and I think it’s actually made things worse. I have accepted that I’m just going to be irrationally terrified of snakes until I die, which might happen sooner than expected if I ever get close enough to a snake.

I’m not only afraid of snakes biting me. That does sound terrifying. But I don’t even want to see one. I don’t want to see it behind glass. I don’t want to see a depiction of it in photograph or illustration.

Do you know what happens when you google, “fear of snakes”? Well, try it out and see. It gives a description of ophidiophobia, right next to a picture of a snake. Do better, Google.

I want to be clear that my phobia is specifically snakes. I do not enjoy skinks, because if you can only see part of a skink’s body, it looks very much like a snake. But it is the lack of arms and legs that really do me in. (That said, I have spent some time thinking about what would happen if I saw a snake with legs, and I still don’t like it.)

Gene Belcher said (sang) it best.

I am fine with any other reptile. Alligators, lizards, iguanas, turtles are all fine. Amphibians are also OK, although I very much don’t want to touch them.

While there is no way to be clinically diagnosed with true ophidiophobia, reading the description leads me to believe I’d be in the running to get a diagnosis. I’m not proud of it, but until our older boys could read, I avoided the reptile house at the Riverbanks Zoo in Columbia. We would go in to the building through the exit door and look at all the fish in the aquarium section, and then I’d masterfully turn them around and tell them we had to go back out the same way we came in. If we had come in through the actual entrance, we would have had to traverse the rooms of reptiles, many of which contained snakes, including an anaconda that was always in the exact same spot, which was underwater up against the glass where you couldn’t avoid seeing it. It wasn’t until we went to the zoo with some friends, and their boys asked if we could go to the reptile house first, and Stephen, age 4, said, “There are no reptiles at this zoo!” that my deception was uncovered. From then on, I would go into the reptile house with the boys, but I would try to stay in the middle of each room, as far away from any of the glass enclosures as possible. The scene in Harry Potter where he talks to the snake and the glass breaks? My nightmares were years ahead of J.K. Rowling’s imaginings.

I know what you’re thinking. Why am I talking about snakes if I hate them so much? Well, recently I ran across the following article: 2025 Children’s Lit Animal Rankings.

I love children’s books. I lived at the library as a child, and reading to my kids is one of my greatest joys. In an alternate timeline, I’d be a children’s librarian. And so I began to read this article with great interest to see which animals featured most prominently in children’s books published this year. Here is part of the list:

If you are familiar with children’s literature, the animals that rank highest are not surprising. In fact, you can probably think of classic books with those animals in the titles (Brown Bear, Brown Bear by Eric Carle and If You Give a Mouse a Cooke by Laura Numeroff immediately came to mind). I didn’t expect to see whales at the top of this list, but why not? We wore down our copy of Baby Beluga when my kids were little. My eye was looking at some of the other top animals and saw a really interesting one nestled in among some of the higher ranked ones.

I’m sorry, what?

Apparently it is the Year of the Snake, so I thought maybe the number was higher this year because of that, but no—the author also did a post ranking animals in 2024, and snakes featured in 76 of the books.

Why, when there are so many other animals for authors to choose from, are people writing children’s books about snakes? Here’s a list of 25 books to celebrate Year of the Snake. And here is a list of more than 70 children’s books about snakes.

For the sake of everyone else who like me is also terrified of snakes, I’m now going to give you some examples of acceptable and unacceptable books about snakes.

The Day Jimmy’s Boa Ate the Wash by Stephen Kellogg

This book is OK, because although Jimmy’s boa is a snake, it doesn’t really look like a snake. All the characters in Kellogg’s books have similar faces whether they are human or animal. If I ignore the fact that the boa constrictor doesn’t have arms or legs, I can handle it. But also, there are lots of other animals that eat things, and I don’t know why Stephen Kellogg didn’t write about those. Jimmy could have had a goat.

Here’s one that I very much do not like:

Duckworth, the Difficult Child by Michael Sussman

I have read this book to my kids, and I had the heebie jeebies the whole time. This one involves the snake actually swallowing the child, which is an absolute no. Also, this snake is creepy looking even though it is just an illustration. That snake is attempting to make eye contact.

Here is one that is OK:

Snakes in Space by Kathryn Dennis

I’m all about exposing children to the real world, and this is a safe way to introduce children to the fact that snakes exist, because they are more just colorful ropes.

Here’s another acceptable snake book:

Can I Play, Too? By Mo Willems

You’ll notice that the snake in this book could even be a worm, maybe. Its features are very poorly defined. It does not bother me. The other good thing about this book is that you know what you’re getting. The “snake” is on the front.

Contrast that with one of my younger sister’s favorite books as a child: Time for Bed by Mem Fox. I consider this one of the worst books ever published.

The illustrations are sweet and beautiful. Each spread shows a different mother/father animal putting their baby animal to bed.

Until you get about halfway through the book, turn the page, and see this:

If you’re wondering, even finding this video and putting it in this post caused me extreme anxiety.

Why, among adorable pictures of bumblebees and rabbits and cows, would you include this? I could not read this to my sister when I was younger. It was too much for me. And, of course, if I tried to skip it, she wouldn’t let me, because she loved snakes.

If the book has an actual photograph of a snake on the front, it is a no. If the snake’s mouth is open, it is an absolute no. There are many nonfiction books that contain factual information about snakes and the covers are all just snake heads with their fangs out. I will not share them here, but you can find them at your local library.

Probably the worst offender of all is one that makes me sad to list, because the illustrations are beautiful and it’s considered a true classic of children’s literature.

Verdi by Janell Cannon

Here are the problems with this book. First, the snake is looking right at me. Second, this snake lives in a tree. In my opinion, the only thing worse than a snake on the ground is a snake in a tree. A snake falling on my head is quite possibly the worst thing I can think of.

You may be wondering, if my fear of snakes is so great, how my kids feel about snakes. Ever since the years-long lie I told my boys at the zoo, I have tried really hard not to pass my fear on to my kids. I have explained that I am more afraid of snakes than I should be. I have told them that not only are most snakes harmless, but even many of the venomous ones are more scared of us than we are of them. I have given them tips on what to do if they ever encounter a snake. I encourage them to explore places that I very much consider “snake zones,” even if I am inwardly fighting my anxiety the whole time. I often pray in these scenarios that if one of my children gets bitten by a snake, my lizard brain that will be screaming GET AWAY FROM HERE will not keep me from seeking medical assistance.

So far, they don’t seem to have inherited my phobia. That said, they have no shame about telling everyone they’ve ever met about how much I hate snakes. That’s OK with me, as long as they know that they don’t have to be afraid, too.

I did recently read the book Slither: How Nature’s Most Maligned Creatures Illuminate Our World, and it was fascinating. I had no problem listening to an audiobook about snakes. It did not at all cure my phobia, but it gave me something about snakes to think about other than my fear of them.

There is an interpretation of Genesis 3 that says that before the Fall, snakes actually did have legs, hence the part of the curse that says they’ll have to slither on the ground on their bellies. I’m on board with this, because it helps me justify my irrational fear.

Where are their arms and legs? It’s not OK.