JK Rowling & Transphobia

If you grew up in the 1980s, which apart from the cyberpunk bit at the beginning were a vile conflux of blandness and a weirdly conservative sort of greed, then the 90s were meant to be an antidote to all that. We had a Body Shop poster on the living room wall of our student […]

Light Amid the Risen Dark

In March I wrote a piece for The Shadow Booth about Susan Cooper’s great young adult novel The Dark is Rising, with reference to the extraordinary cover of the edition I had as a kid (see above), which scared me so much that at the time I couldn’t read the book. I was delighted when the […]

Review of ‘The Weirdstone of Brisingamen’ by Alan Garner

Alan Garner’s brilliantly titled 1960 fantasy takes North European tropes familiar from ‘The Lord of the Rings’ and spins them into a very English children’s fantasy. Two children, a brother and sister called Colin and Susan, are sent to stay with relatives of their mother’s when she must join their father abroad for six months. […]