Boy In Darkness and other stories
£5.09
Essential for the title story alone - This is the first time Mervyn Peake s short stories have been collected together in one volume. It s a slim book, but essential if for no other reason than the republication of the title story, which is one of the great short novels of fantasy, as well as being a compact addition to Peake s Gormenghast books. The Boy of the title is Titus Groan at the age of fourteen, and although he goes through most of the story being called simply the Boy (and although Joanne Harris, in her foreword, says this is all he is ever called, he is called Titus, just once, on page 40). Boy in Darkness is a perfectly written nightmare, the sort that might occur after reading H G Wells Island of Doctor Moreau while indulging in a little too much late-night cheese. Titus s night journey outside the cloying halls of Gormenghast brings him into the clutches of three of Peake s most well-drawn Dickensian grotesques, in the shape of the Goat, Hyena, and the blood-chilling Lamb, whose icy presence makes me wonder how this short novel could ever have been issued as a book for children (which it was, in 1996). How any child reading it could ever look at anything white, or soft, or quietly spoken, without a jitter of fears, I don t know, because, once you read Boy in Darkness, the deeply evil Lamb haunts all things white, and soft, and quietly spoken, whatever age you are.Boy in Darkness takes up about two thirds of this book. In comparison, some of the other tales feel rather short and light, but that is more a reflection of the title story being so good. Of the others, I Bought a Palm-Tree and The Connoisseurs are comic sketches, the former perhaps being autobiographical, the latter a neat little critique of pompous critics. The Weird Journey is an experiment in style that comes closer than most to evoking the weird, underwater logic of dreams. Danse Macabre is the best of the remaining five, particularly if, like me, you enjoy ghost stories, although this one isn t by any means the tale of a conventional type of haunting. But Same Time, Same Place, though a well-told tale, relies on a fear of the physically grotesque which feels out of place in the work of an author who has such sympathy with the emotionally grotesque.An essential book for anyone who has enjoyed any of Peake s work, this little collection is peppered with sketches by the writer s own hand.