April 20, 2025

Barely a Book Club #16: Wolves, Caves, Magic

Arrivals by train, wizards, wolves.

There is, almost always, an arrival by train: a child, or pair of children, sent to stay with relations in some romantic or forbidding corner of the British Isles (Cornwall, Cheshire, Gwynedd). Not always, but often, there is a Merlin figure (Merriman Lyon, Cadellin). There are usually wolves, in some form or other.

These are some observations drawn from plunging into the Something Good Winter Reading List described in our last issue. To recap: “These are books ostensibly written for children, but equally appealing to adults. They are set in the British Isles, and they all have some connection to folkways, the occult, pre-Christian myths and legends. Most of all, they have a strong sense of place and connection to their settings, which are deeply fraught with history.”

It was symptomatically silly of me to assume that a long list of books would be easier to tackle as a Barely a Book Club project than a single title. As such, I’ve been a little quieter on this front than intended. So, instead of ghosting on the whole thing, here are some quick thoughts on the books I got to. Maybe you’d like to share your impressions too.

I started this reading project by diving into the first two books by Alan Garner. The Weirdstone of Brisingamen and The Moon of Gomrath, published in 1960 and 1963, respectively, are the first two entries in what would become a trilogy nearly 50 years later with the publication of Boneland in 2012. (I haven’t gotten to Boneland yet, but the idea of a writer revisiting his childish heroes in middle age after such a long absence fascinates me still.)

I really liked those first two books, though, even if they have the feeling of a writer finding his feet. Two children, Colin and Susan, go to stay with family friends in Cheshire while their parents go overseas, where they discover stirrings of an ancient, magic world and its attendant evils. It’s a setup so common as to feel almost archetypal, a structure that supports everything from the Narnia books to several of Susan Cooper’s Dark Is Rising sequence to Joan Aiken’s Wolves of Willoughby Chase (more about both below).

The books shift back and forth from a sort of easygoing rural adventure, complete with charming characters who speak in phonetically-spelled-out dialectic (“By gow, lad, there’s summat rum afoot toneet!”), to moments of visceral anxiety and fear. There’s a moment where the two siblings disobey the mage Cadellin’s (the Merlin stand-in) instructions and precipitate what might very well be the end of the world, though one they won’t see as it won’t come about for generations. Cadellin turns them back home, as there’s nothing they can do to help, and the remorse they experience is startling; a cold, hopeless feeling.

What stood out the most to me, though, was a grueling underground passage sequence in Weirdstone that made me feel like I was watching 2005’s The Descent all over again. The children and their dwarf pal Fenodyree are escaping from a cave system deep beneath the hills, and they find themselves wriggling through a tunnel so narrow and twisting their bodies can barely squeeze through it:

They lay full length, walls, floors, and roof fitting them like a second skin. Their heads were turned to one side, for in any other position the roof pressed their mouths into the sand and they could not breathe. The only way to advance was to pull with the fingertips and to push with the toes, since it was impossible to flex their legs at all, and any bending of the elbows threatened to jam the arms helplessly under the body.

Nightmarish! What it really brought me back to was a week I spent writing a podcast about the 2018 Tham Luang cave rescue, the research materials and first-person accounts I was working from enough to actually give me nightmares for several days straight.

Horrible caves notwithstanding (or maybe… withstanding?) Garner’s books, with their folkloric sense of place, so rooted in his native Cheshire, reminded me strongly of what I love about Susan Cooper’s Dark Is Rising sequence. (There are so many echoes; there’s also a terrifying underground tunnel in Over Sea, Under Stone).

I also returned to Cooper’s books in my reading project. Though they are all worthy, I think The Dark Is Rising stands apart from the rest of the series as something totemically powerful, like ancient mystic text, while the others read like very good youth-oriented fantasy. I like the Wicker Man-ness of Greenwitch and the Wales setting of The Grey King, but hero Will Stanton’s adventures just don’t have the same impact as the story of his coming of age, and when he meets up with the kids from the series’ other books, it just feels a bit awkward.

The big discovery for me this winter, though, was Joan Aiken. The Wolves of Willoughby Chase is a delightfully morbid adventure set in an England beset by wolves and greedy governesses, in which poor relation Sylvia goes to live with her cousin Bonnie at the family manor of the title when Bonnie’s parents go overseas (see?) to tend to her mother’s fading health. (The chapter where Sylvia’s train car is beset by savage wolves while her eccentric carriage-mate fights them off is a treasure of a set piece.) At Willoughby Chase, her and Bonnie’s distant cousin Miss Slighcarp (a wonderfully evil name), hired to look after them, instead turns them out into the wilderness, fires all the faithful servants, and plots to turn the beloved family home into a wretched orphanage.

It is spooky and comic and maudlin all at once, and written by a gifted storyteller with a masterly control of tone. And, if the book sounds like an Edward Gorey story, well, Gorey illustrated the covers for many of what would become the Wolves series of books, and a better artistic coupling is hard to imagine. I have to wonder how much of his signature style was influenced by Aiken’s writing (and maybe vice-versa?). I immediately went looking for the rest of the series, and, finding them difficult to locate in North America, ordered a stack of them (many with original Gorey covers!) to a friend’s address in Vermont. More on them to come.

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So: those are the books I read. I didn’t make it to Mythago Wood, nor Kingdoms of Elfin, nor The Ghost of Thomas Kempe, nor The Box of Delights. I started Diana Wynne Jones’ Charmed Life and enjoyed it greatly but need to find time to finish it. Maybe they’ll have to wait until next winter. For now—which, if any, did you read? Let me know in the comments below or by replying to this email. I’m not sure what the next Barely a Book Club selection will be, but once I figure it out, you’ll be the first to know.

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