The House on the Brink, by John Gordon

The House on the Brink is John Gordon's second novel, published in 1970, after his first, The Giant Under the Snow (1968). Both are a kind of folk horror for young adults, and both are in the mold of Alan Garner, with children protagonists encountering weird phenomenon. The House on the Brink has also been acclaimed as a novel in the style of M.R. James's ghost stories, but there is little spookiness in this flat tale of two teens who are haunted by a recurring tree stump in the marshes which may or may not be animated, and in association with a local legend of King John's lost treasure. The teens also learn they are water diviners, and they mix with peculiar adults with potentially sinister motives. This could have made a good story, but the real problem is in Gordon's punchy newspaper-styled prose, with lots of sentence fragments and metaphors that stick out like sore thumbs. This leads to many ambiguous sections where the reader simply isn't told properly what has happened, and is left to infer by subsequent events. As a story I found it a real disappointment.

The Big House, by Naomi Mitchison

Originally published in 1950 as a children's book, The Big House might better be described as a Scottish fairy novel with two children as the protagonists. It is overly descriptive and wordy, using many unusual Scottish terms and representing the characters' speech in a Scottish dialect; it is hard to imagine children of today having the patience to read it through to the end. It is also a timeslip novel, with a critique of class structures. Set at the end of World War II, it tells of young Su (short for Susan) of the wealthy Big House in western Scotland, and her friendship with a fisherman boy called Winkie, who together, one Halloween night, befriend a piper Donald Ferguson who has just escaped from the fairies after being captive for two terms of seventy years. The piper is pursued by the Prince and others of the fairies, and Su and Winkie help him to be reborn among modern people, while they timeslip back twice (to multiples of seventy years) in history, first to recapture Su's stolen shadow, and then to restore baby Donald's purloined soul. If this sounds confusing, that's because it is. The book, which has many intriguing aspects, unfortunately fails to bring life to the story, and it feels more like an exercise than an entertainment.