The Edge of the World by John Gordon

1985 paperback from Fontana Lions

Gordon’s 1983 YA novel The Edge of the World seems to have enjoyed a bit more success than his previous book, The Waterfall Box, as it had hardback editions in both the UK and US, and a UK paperback in 1985.

It takes place in the middle of the summer holidays in Wisbech in the Fenlands of Cambridgeshire. 13-year-old Tekker Begdale (real name Terence, though only his mother calls him that, and only when she wants to annoy him) and Kit Huntley, a girl of the same age, have seen, not a ghost, but a “ghost like thing”—“a man shape with a horse’s skull”—near the cottage of a local woman with a fearsome reputation, Ma Grist. Later, in the same area with Kit and her older brother Dan, Tekker indulges in one of his pet projects, seeing if he has mental powers. He’s already tried mind-reading with Kit (it didn’t work), now he tries telekinesis, willing the surface of a pond to ripple. To his delight he seems to have managed it, but the next moment the whole world changes: there’s a flash, and the fens become a vast red desert under a purple sky. Then it’s gone. They’re approached by old Mr Welbeck, who claims to have seen it once before, when, as a pilot during the first World War, he crashed his plane in the fens and found himself for a moment in that red desert world. He’d been showing off to his girlfriend, Stella, a woman who, he said, could see a whole other landscape in the fens, full of “Wonderful things”, “shining shapes”, and “a glittering mountain”.

Tekker discovers he can bring that red-and-purple world back with the same mental effort, and he and Kit find the wreck of Mr Welbeck’s Bristol Scout plane there. Later, trying to convince the still-sceptical Dan, they re-enter the world once more, but are attacked by the Horsehead-thing, which leaves Dan comatose. They learn from Mr Welbeck that Dan’s only hope is for Tekker and Kit to go further into this strange other world and find the woman he loved, Stella, who was imprisoned there, in a glass palace, by her jealous sister—the woman known as Ma Grist.

1983 UK hardback, cover art by Geoff Taylor

What follows is a tense journey across a constantly challenging landscape—first a vast red desert, then a climb down a massive cliff, then to the towering, labyrinthine palace of glass—where Tekker and Kit are pursued by the Mari Lwyd-like Horseheads. These are, surely, the best part of the book. Basically, they’re Tolkien’s Black Riders, combining as they do undead men and horses, who later take to the skies on lizard-winged flying machines. It’s their equivalent of the Black Breath that has felled Dan. (I wonder if, also, the horned cow-skull creatures from Time Bandits might have had an influence, too.)

There are hints this other landscape may have some relationship with the real world. An actual palace was planned to be built in the fens four hundred years ago, so perhaps the glass one is an echo of what might have been. Meanwhile, the dry desert and towering cliff are the exact opposite of the flat, watery fens. But it also seems these lands were created, or at least shaped, by Ma Grist and Stella: Stella, who saw that “glittering mountain”, now dwells in it, while the jealous Ma Grist has imprisoned her there thanks to the vast desert, cliff, and the Horseheads she commands.

Is this world, then, a parallel realm—perhaps one of many—that just happens to be accessible at this point in the Fens, or was it somehow created by events in the real world then taken up and crafted by Ma Grist and her sister? I suspect Gordon stayed clear of answering such questions because, to him, the important element was to open up reality to be stranger than we think it is. As Tekker says at one point:

“Look at all that land out there. It looks flat and dull but it’s full of things you’d never guess. I feel I could split it wide open like a skin and find something else inside it.”

Or Kit (in what I like to think of as the book’s trailer moment):

“There’s always something just beyond the edge of things, and sometimes you learn the trick of getting there.”

1983 US hardback, art by Michael Hays

The fraught nature of male-female relationships, particularly in their early stages, are one of the driving elements of Gordon’s YA fiction. Tekker and Kit are incapable of admitting their feelings for each other, but are quick to feel jealousy and turn spiky, accusing one another of breaches of a relationship that can’t, it seems, be acknowledged in any other way. The dry desert, forbidding cliff, and confusing glass labyrinth, then, could be seen as an actualisation of the emotional barriers people place between themselves. They are, after all, what’s between Mr Welbeck and his love Stella, created by the jealousy of Stella’s sister Ma Grist. But Mr Welbeck needs no fantasy land, as he talks of sticking to his house because it’s his “fortress” and “bolt-hole” — but against what? The Horseheads, or human relationships? And there’s a hint, I think, that Stella and Ma Grist may even be one person, with Stella the loving aspect that can only be reached once Ma Grist’s forbidding nature is overcome. It’s all quite emotionally complicated.

And crossing this landscape, facing its dangers together, might not lead to Tekker and Kit speaking more openly of their feelings, but it forces them to work together, often in actual physical contact. “We balance each other,” Tekker says at one point, because they’re having to move with their arms tight around each other to avoid falling, but it’s as close as he comes to admitting the other aspects of their growing relationship.

For me, The Edge of the World doesn’t work as well as Gordon’s more ghostly or subtle supernatural fiction. Tekker’s use of mental powers to enter the other world are dropped once he and Kit are given a flat disc of “bog oak dug up from the fen” which allows them to enter that other world by turning it. Why not just have the disc and do away with the complication of the mental powers? (Or make better use of the mental powers and have Tekker employ them in some way in their quest?) And Gordon’s terse, impressionistic prose style, which is great for capturing immediate sensations and fleeting moments—and so, perfect for adding a ghostly edge to a real-world narrative—doesn’t work, for me, so well with this sort of outright fantasy, which requires a clear establishment of the landscape and situation, at least initially. It’s hard to get an overall feel for some of the situations Kit and Tekker find themselves in, and as a result, dangers arrive suddenly, as do their solutions. It all feels like it’s filmed with nothing but too-close handheld camera-work, which can create a lot of tension, but can also be disorientating and confusing.

But the very oddness of the fantasy aspects at least gives it a sense of authenticity. You never feel Gordon is rehashing something generic, but rather that he has his imaginative eye set on some world he’s discovering within his own head, and relating it exactly as he finds it, even if it doesn’t make perfect sense.

Gordon does seem to produce some books I can’t quite get on with as much as others, and the ones that don’t work for me, such as The Ghost on the Hill, largely don’t because they’re too impressionistic and confusing; they leave me needing to read them a second time but not really wanting to because I didn’t enjoy the first read. The Edge of the World is more of that type than I’d like (because I love the theme of boy-and-girl-go-to-another-world—key examples being Le Guin’s Threshold and Catherine Storr’s Marianne Dreams), but at the same time it’s obvious there’s a genuine artistic intent behind all of his works, which makes the best of them—The House on the Brink, for instance—all the more special.

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The Troy Game by Jean Morris

Bodley Head HB

Jean Morris’s YA novel The Troy Game (1987), set in Dark Ages Britain, starts with Brannock, second son of the King of the Seven Kingdoms, being sent on a mission by the druid-like Elder, Mennor. There are rumours of invaders coming from the east, and Mennor needs a message taken to his Order at Caerdroia. He chooses Brannock because of his ability to use a “bob” to detect not just water and buried metal but hidden paths, as the way to Caerdroia is a secret to those not of the Order. Stopping off at his uncle’s kingdom, Brannock is given his eldest cousin Eilian as a guide, as she has accompanied their own Elder at least to the start of the hidden way. And as they embark on the final section of the journey, Brannock and Eilian begin to realise they are tracing a vast troy, like the ancient, now-fading dance-patterns in their own villages.

The book opens with such impatience to get Brannock on his way (entirely excusable in a YA novel) that the reason for his mission feels almost like an afterthought. Vague rumours of invaders from the east, and Mennor never explaining why he’s not able to take the message himself — it’s evident Morris basically wants to get her pair of protagonists onto the vast troy and tracing its weird path as soon as possible. And the troy is obviously the main point of interest, here, not the invaders from the east. It’s presented as not so much a man-made thing as a concentrated mystical aspect of the land itself. Walking the wrong way doesn’t just get you lost, it produces some dark, nightmare-like experiences; try to shortcut the circular path, and you’ll find yourself ejected and unable to find any part of the troy — entrance, exit, or even where you just were.

Chapters within the troy end with an illustration of the path taken so far…

Perhaps it’s the effect of having read Mythago Wood and its sequels, but the troy, here, feels very much like one of Holdstock’s mythogenic landscapes — particularly with Holdstock using terms like “the oak-vortex”, and “the ley matrix”, as though the troy were just a more ordered version of the same whorls of weirdness. Inside the troy, what seems like a small forest proves to be immense; an old Roman villa with a slightly ghostly inhabitant can be entered at the same point from two different directions; there are sudden changes of weather, as well as of landscape, all just as in Ryhope Wood. There’s even a hint of the same ancient, pre-human world behind it all:

“This was ancient deep forest; not the mild open kind that could be travelled with little trouble, but the oldest oak forest, where men never went, where the vast trees grew and died and toppled and rotted untouched, as they had done since the beginning of the world.”

Beaver/Red Fox PB, 1989

For most of the book, The Troy Game feels at the younger limit of YA — its getting quickly to the journey without bothering with much set-up, the vagueness about the invaders from the east and the broadly archetypal characters (kings and queens as parents, wizard-like old men as village elders) — but things take a disturbing and more complex turn towards the end of the book. The invaders from the east, when encountered, aren’t simply barging in Viking-like and taking over, they’re seeking alliances with the aim of fomenting a civil war, but claim to be merely looking for a new home. (In the wonderfully double-edged words of one of them: “we come in peace but in strength”.) The Elders themselves are divided as to what to do, and their leader seems too weak to really accomplish anything. Mennor, then, makes a desperate move, and summons the Wild Hunt, despite knowing it will not simply attack these invaders, but throw the land itself into chaos:

“The Wild Hunt may be invoked, but not controlled; once the Hunt is up, its prey is everything in its path.”

And that’s what happens. Chaos, then ruin. After recovering from the Hunt’s passing, Brannock begins his journey back from Caerdroia, and it’s as though the air of fantasy has gone from the lands he passes through: he’s out of story and into history. The Seven Kingdoms ruled by his father prove to be seven villages; the invaders from the east — blond and tall — are now scattered among the people of the land, married to village women, with young families already, making a go as farmers, not warriors. Why, then, the terror of the Wild Hunt? It’s as though all the Hunt did was stir everything up in one big land-wide cauldron, then leave people so disorientated there was no room for thoughts of war or conquest, merely survival. The invaders are part of the land now, and the land itself has spent something of its mystical power.

Brannock realises his recovery from the chaos of the Wild Hunt didn’t just take weeks or months, but perhaps years. None of his relatives recognise him. After the younger-end-of-YA feel at the start of the novel, there’s a distinct note of something broken and lost — the magic has gone away, and the Dark Ages story-world of kings and queens and elders has been replaced by a more realistic land of farmers and villagers repairing roofs and tilling the land.

None of this is overly examined and, in a way, that makes it less immediately dark than it sounds, but also more mysterious. Still, there’s a haunting feeling to the ending, the sense that the world has irretrievably changed from the magical-mystical to the historical. As a story — particularly read as an adult — it feels a little unsatisfying, but nevertheless there’s a poetic air which is quite appropriate for such a short book.

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The Claw by Ramsey Campbell

Fontana PB

The Claw (first published simply as Claw in 1983, as by Jay Ramsey, for Richard Bachman-like reasons) could be said to form the middle of a thematic trilogy of early novels from Campbell, about parenthood: The Nameless (1981) is about the sheer anxiety of what, out there in the world, might prey on a child (mad cults, kidnappers and killers); The Influence (1988) is about the generational influences within a family that might prey on a child (mental illness and passed-on cycles of psychological abuse); The Claw, meanwhile, is about the physical abuse a child might suffer from their own parents. Like The Nameless, The Claw employs a zero-subtlety approach in using the supernatural to enact its theme. In the former novel, an evil cult kidnaps the main character’s child and inducts her into a life of ritualised, nihilistic murder; in The Claw, meanwhile, there’s an evil artefact (which belongs to an evil cult) that causes parents to have murderous impulses towards their child. The Claw of the title, then, is like a supernatural version of Hitchcock’s maguffin. For Hitchcock, the maguffin was the thing — the secret formula, the microfilm, whatever — that both the baddies and the goodies want and the protagonist has, which causes a lot of chasing around. Here, the Claw is the thing that unleashes in its main characters what, in some real people, doesn’t need any supernatural cause at all. The advantage of a supernatural maguffin, though, is it doesn’t require any deeper motivation for that behaviour — and, when it gets destroyed, the behaviour goes away. Not so in real life.

1983 Futura PB

The story opens in rare territory for Campbell: overseas. In Nigeria to research his latest spy thriller, Alan Knight meets a British anthropologist, David Marlowe, who offers to drive him to the airport when he returns home. Once there, he asks a favour. The post from Lagos being what it was, he wants Alan to take a parcel back to England, and deliver it to the Foundation for African Studies. Alan agrees, and (he’s a bit of an idiot, considering he writes spy novels) only finds out when he’s passing through UK customs that it contains a potential weapon: a four-taloned metal claw. Fortunately, he’s let through, and that weekend, the Claw remains at the coastal Norfolk home he shares with his wife Liz and six-year-old daughter Anna. But he soon makes the trip to the Foundation in London — only to find he’s unaccountably left the thing at home. There’s worse to come, though. The Foundation’s Dr Hetherington tells him that David Marlowe has brutally, and for no apparent reason, murdered his wife and daughter — and that the Claw is an artefact belonging to a cult known as the Leopard Men, whose initiation rite requires its members to murder a young girl of their own blood. Incensed he was duped into letting such a repugnant thing into his home, Alan goes back, only to find it has been stolen. But its influence has started to take hold: suddenly unable to write, he starts getting tetchy with Anna…

The Claw’s effect isn’t only limited to the Knight family. A local man with a childlike mentality is found having killed, with his bare hands, one of the goats that graze the cliff near the Knights’ house. (Which inevitably sets up the idea of victims as scapegoats, but this doesn’t seem to have been developed.) Meanwhile in the Knight household itself, Alan’s growing hostility towards his daughter gets worse until he receives a phone call from Nigeria. Isaac Banjo, a translator at the University of Lagos who helped Marlowe in his researches into the Leopard Men, knows what’s going on, feels guilty about his part in it, and wants to help. Alan, though, has to come to Nigeria to put an end to things. This he does, but that leaves Liz alone with Anna, and Liz is also beginning to fall under the influence of the still-missing Claw.

St Martin’s Press US HB, 1983

I have to say that, though Ramsey Campbell is one of my favourite writers, this is not a book of his I’d recommend, unless (like me) you’re intent on reading all of his novels. And usually, with a writer whose work I know, I can still get something out of a lesser novel by considering it in terms of the development of their themes, or of their craft, and so on. And perhaps part of the problem is that I couldn’t do that for most of The Claw. The characters just don’t have the sort of depth Campbell usually endows them with. And this is particularly notable in a novel which deals with such a difficult central theme. Parents with violent impulses towards their children are repugnant as characters, and a lot has to be done to make it worth spending time with them. When Alan and Liz begin looking on their very young and vulnerable daughter with irritation and worse — “Liz watched her, loathing her babyishness. How could she once have loved and been proud of this child?” — they become very thin as characters, with no self-examination or awareness (necessarily so, I suppose, because of the demands of the plot). And there are too many chapters, it seems, in the middle of The Claw where we’re in the presence of Liz and Anna, and Liz is on the verge of violence towards Anna, and Anna is terrified, and nothing much else is going on. There’s one moment where I thought the novel was going to start engaging with its own themes in a more explicit way, when the hippie-ish barman, Jimmy, at one points says: “The absolute authority of parents is fascism in the home.” But this line isn’t examined any further, and that’s the last we hear of Jimmy as a character.

The strand of the story where Alan is out there in Nigeria investigating the cult — and investigations like that would normally make a novel, for me — are sketchy and unconvincing. (Campbell’s chapters set in Lagos are excellent evocations, I think — though I’ve never been there, and, it turns out, neither had Campbell. But when Alan and Isaac head into the jungle, it all starts to feel like low-budget scenery.) To top it all, the Leopard Men aren’t that interesting as a cult (certainly not as nihilistically evocative as the previous book’s Nameless). They feel a bit under-thought out, even generic, a bit obvious. Africa — Leopard Men. Marlowe — Heart of Darkness. Evil, cursed artefact from foreign shores. Even worse: “There is a legend told throughout Africa that the last Leopard Man will come from a far land and destroy the power of the claw.”

1992 Tor cover, art by Tim O’Brien

There may be a reason for this. (There are probably many — such as how difficult the subject must have been to write about.) Campbell says in his afterword (appended in 1992, when the novel was reissued under his own name) that after it was initially submitted, the manuscript went through some revisions. One of these was to add chapters from young Anna’s point of view, something he says he didn’t include in the first version. And these are the chapters where the book really comes alive. Faced with suddenly hostile, even alienating parents, Anna is the character in this novel who is allowed depth, and of course it’s a depth that’s all about sheer terror:

“She couldn’t tell anyone about mummy, it was too horrible a thing to say, so much so that it paralysed her mouth. The more she tried to say it, the less able she was… She was trapped inside herself.”

Or, my favourite line:

“The stranger who pretended to be mummy was made up of teeth and nails.”

When it came out in the US as Night of the Claw, Kirkus Reviews said it was “an overlong but steady, creepy, discomforting chiller—thanks to a subdued style, shifting viewpoints (including that of confused, terrified Anna), and richly detailed backgrounds.” Perhaps my own reaction is down to knowing Campbell could do so much better, as he does in Incarnate (where parental abuse isn’t a major theme, but is part of at least one of the characters’ stories), The Influence, and his later novel The House on Nazareth Hill. I can’t help wondering if his adding chapters from Anna’s point of view aren’t something of a breakthrough moment in his craft (even though he’d written short stories from a child’s point of view before, in Dark Companions — though that collection only came out the previous year.) Certainly, the final chapters, where Anna escapes from her increasingly hostile mother and flees across a confusing coastal landscape at night to take refuge in a house that proves to have been the scene of an even worse Claw-inspired act of parental violence, is pure Campbell: the nightmare journey, and in particular the nightmare exploration of an empty-but-not-empty house.

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