The Sundial is Shirley Jackson’s fourth novel, begun in 1956 (following a couple of years of creative block, according to her biographer Ruth Franklin) and finished in July 1957. It was published to mixed reviews the following year.

The setting, like the two masterpieces that would follow it (The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle), is a large country house, surrounded by a walled-in estate. This is the home of the Halloran family, who, as the novel begins, have just buried their only son, Lionel. Lionel’s wife, Maryjane, is convinced her mother-in-law pushed Lionel down the stairs. She shares her suspicions with her ten-year-old daughter Fancy, and soon the little girl is asking “Shall I push her? … Like she pushed my daddy?”

Whether she pushed him or not, Mrs Halloran now owns the house (her husband is still alive but feeble in mind and body), and says she’s going to eject as many of its inhabitants as she can: Maryjane will be given a small allowance and sent to live in an apartment in the city, though Fancy (who stands to inherit after Mrs Halloran) will stay; Fancy’s governess Miss Ogilvie, and young Essex, who came to catalogue the library, will simply have to leave. Meanwhile, Aunt Fanny—the aged Mr Halloran’s sister—will be moved into the house’s tower, with the implication that she’ll be expected to stay there.

They’re saved, though, when Aunt Fanny, after getting lost in the house’s extensive gardens and having some sort of agoraphobic attack (perhaps egged on by Fancy, though the girl denies being there), seems to receive a communication from her dead father, saying the world is going to end (“Fire and floods and sidewalks melting away and the earth running with boiling lava”), though everyone in the house will be saved, the lone inheritors of a new world, into which they will emerge “safe and pure”.

Mrs Halloran—as well as pretty much everyone else in the novel—accepts this, and allows everyone to stay after all: if she sends them away from the house now, they’ll be killed in the coming apocalypse, and she doesn’t want that on her conscience. It’s agreed not to tell anyone on the outside (and it’s perhaps notable of this misanthropic bunch that not one of them has someone they want to warn or save), but a number of people turn up by chance and are allowed to stay. There’s an old acquaintance of Mrs Halloran’s, Mrs Willow, now a widow and in search of some means of providing for her late-twenties daughters Arabella and Julia, who come along too. Seventeen-year-old Gloria Desmond, daughter of Mrs Halloran’s cousin, also turns up, having been sent for a holiday while her father is away. And Aunt Fanny decides to adopt a random man she finds in the local village—perhaps realising they have only Essex and the feeble Mr Halloran in the house, now—a man she pretends to recognise as (a name clearly made-up on the spot) Captain Scarabombardon.

They start making their plans. Aunt Fanny buys bulk supplies at random—food, medicines, umbrellas. Mrs Halloran issues a page of rules everyone will be expected to follow on the night before the apocalypse and that first new morning, including the need to look presentable: “I want to know that I am bringing with me into that clean world a family neat, prepossessing, and well-groomed.” She talks about “the good impressions we must create”, even though that new world will, supposedly, be devoid of people. The servants will be sent away the day before (to die with everyone else), and the villagers will be given an (unknown to them) farewell party.

The sundial of the novel’s title is the one part of the house that, because it has been placed off-centre, defies the otherwise perfect architectural symmetry. The dial bears an inscription, “What is this world?”, a quote from Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale:

What is this world? What asketh man to have?
Now with his love, now in his colde grave,
Allone, with-outen any companye.

If Jackson is asking “What is this world?” of the world she’s created in The Sundial, then it’s a world of casual backbiting, social power-play, and a constant, outwardly civil cruelty between the characters. And it’s one in which the “love” referred to by Chaucer is already absent, well before the “colde grave” comes to call.

All of the characters are here not because they love one another, but because they’re dependent on Mrs Halloran’s riches. And Mrs Halloran, whose one and only aim seems to be to own the house (“It is my house now, and it will be my house then. I will not relinquish one stone of it in this world or any other.”) presumably lets them stay not only for her conscience’s sake (she barely has one), but because she knows, if she ousted them and they thought they were going to die, they’d most likely force themselves back inside, and maybe get rid of her in the process. Rich she may be, but her riches are her only power, and they’ll surely mean nothing in the new world.

One of the things that means The Sundial doesn’t work as well as Jackson’s subsequent two novels, for me, is that it has no main character, no side to take amongst all these rather icy folk. Hill House has Eleanor, and Castle has Merricat. Neither is necessarily admirable (Eleanor is weak, Merricat a murderer), but both are very clearly, and relatably, human. There’s no one like that here. And not just because none of the characters is exactly sympathetic—that doesn’t matter—it’s because none of them is fleshed out enough. Mrs Halloran gets the closest, though largely because she’s the one in charge. But whereas at the start I felt that her believing in the prophecy was more by way of acknowledging a sort of social chess-move on Aunt Fanny’s part (to force her to allow everyone to stay), by the end of the novel it’s apparent she fully believes it, leaving me unable to work her out, as a character. She declares she’ll be queen of the new world when it comes, and buys herself a gold crown. Perhaps she, too, went insane, just more quietly? The rest of the characters (all but one) are too shallow to be much differentiated. When Jackson began bringing in new people—Arabella, Julia, Gloria, the captain—I couldn’t work out why, because none of them brought anything different to the story. Granted, Julia makes a break for it and tries to leave the house for the city, but it might as easily have been Arabella, or Gloria, or Maryjane.

The one exception to all this is Fancy, the ten year old girl whose self-absorption and lack of sentimentality made me think of her as a proto-Merricat (the narrator of Jackson’s last novel, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, with whom she shares a certain witchyness). Fancy is the one character with any life to her, and the one character to see through the ridiculousness of the prophecy, and the household’s belief that the world ending would be a good thing. What, she asks at one point, “makes anyone think you’re going to be more happy or peaceful just because you’re the only ones left?” And: “you all want the whole world to be changed so you will be different”, with the clear implication this isn’t going to be the case. Fancy herself, meanwhile, is the only one to actually want the world outside to continue to exist, even to go out into it:

“Who wants to be safe, for heaven’s sake? … I’d rather live in a world full of other people, even dangerous people. I’ve been safe all my life…”

Early on, I suspected the events of the novel were, really, driven by some witchy plot by Fancy. We know she has a very detailed doll-house, and at one point one of its dolls is found on the sundial, pierced by pins, voodoo-style—is she, then, actually manipulating all these events? If she really was present when Aunt Fanny had her anxiety-driven visions, did she in fact create them, as part of her aim of getting her own back on Mrs Halloran for pushing Lionel down the stairs? (I couldn’t help picturing Fancy, with her very detailed doll-house, as a stand-in for the author, who is herself playing with her own little fictional doll-house, with the Hallorans and co. as dolls—and just as lifeless as dolls, too.)

The thing is, Fancy appears in the first chapter, and briefly (and disappearingly) in the second, then is absent for most of the rest of the novel till the finale. And I suspect the reason for this is that Jackson might have sensed how quickly Fancy would have demolished all the other characters, and quite rightly taken over the narrative, making it into a very different novel (a better one, but evidently not the one Jackson wanted to write at that point). Fancy is the one living character among a host of the dead and the dull, and the basic notion of The Sundial just wouldn’t have withstood her little-girl pertinacity and self-interest. So, she’s left to reappear at the end, where she promptly assumes the dominance due to her, as though marking her place at the centre of a future novel (Castle).

Without her, the rest of the novel is episodic and patchy. It’s funny, yes, in a very dark, deadpan, Charles Addams kind of way, but the humour can never be anything more than witty, snipy lines, because none of the characters has enough character to support anything deeper. (You can’t joke about Julia, or Arabella, or Gloria, because what is there to joke about?) Elsewhere, chapters, or even incidents in chapters, feel like they might be better as standalone stories. A number actually suggest existing Jackson stories, such as Julia’s nightmare journey through the absurdly-named Fog Pass in the company of a sadistic and lecherous taxi driver (which could sit alongside a story like “The Bus” or “Paranoia” from Dark Tales). Jackson’s portrait of the nearby village as striving for an outward gentility while knowing its one and only attraction is a house where a child murdered all her family but one aunt (another detail that points to We Have Always Lived in the Castle), captures something of Jackson’s satire on late 50s America, and could easily have been a novel on its own. Incidents such as the Hallorans having to start burning books when Aunt Fanny’s supply-buying requires the library shelves for storage, or Aunt Fanny creating a duplicate of her mother’s house in the attic, or her getting lost in the garden maze, or the visit of a rival apocalyptic cult who are expecting to be taken to Saturn one day, and have had to renounce all metal ornaments—all these could be Jackson stories, and might have worked better standalone than here, in a novel, where they don’t really gel with anything else.

Jack Sullivan in The Penguin Encyclopedia of Horror and the Supernatural is much more positive about The Sundial, calling it “a quirky, brilliant tale of apocalyptic terror”. In it, he says, “Jackson pulled out all the stops… and was not afraid to switch tones abruptly.” (I’d say the tones don’t so much switch as wander.) And while I’d certainly agree “these are some of Jackson’s most intensely neurotic and unpleasant characters” (though without the “intensely”), and that the humour is “more sardonic and pungent than in any of her work to this point”, I don’t know if I can agree that this humour, as Sullivan says, “is irresistible”.

Perhaps if I’d read The Sundial before Hill House and Castle, I might have appreciated its dark humour more—but only because it provides a taster of what, in those final two books, is so well developed. It’s a further examination of her intense ambivalence about the idea of home. A quote from a talk she gave about the writing of Sundial is revealing about this theme in her fiction. Saying that her fiction, up to that point, had mainly been about people trying to get into some walled-off paradise they never attain (those nightmare journeys home), she decided to try writing something that starts within the walled-off paradise, only to find:

“I had set myself up nicely within the wall inside a big strange house I found there, locked the gates behind me, and discovered the only way to stay with any degree of security was to destroy, utterly, everything outside.”

In her creation of ten-year-old Fancy, who welcomes danger so long as it brings her people, Jackson had perhaps allowed a little kernel of herself to defy that sense of apocalyptic, agoraphobic dread which powers her final two novels. Fancy/Merricat—the wilful and witchy girl who lacks sentimentality and can push a grandmother down the stairs, or poison her family—is, perhaps, Jackson’s version of a survivor-character, her perfect embodiment of vitality in the otherwise dark and cruel world she creates in her fiction. The trouble was, the rather low-tension atmosphere of social backbiting and petty power games she created in The Sundial wasn’t challenge enough for the likes of Fancy/Merricat, and the girl had to be left offstage for too long.

I came to this novel because a brief description I read somewhere reminded me of David Lindsay’s Devil’s Tor. Like it, First Light (1989) is set in the southwest of England (on the Devon/Dorset border), and deals with the uncovering of an ancient tomb somehow linked to the stars. The only other Ackroyd novel I’ve read is his first, Hawksmoor (1985), which I remember as being nightmarish (in the full dream-like sense), with a lot of impressionistic writing as it slips between two times. First Light is different. Its prose is clear, its tone often comic (or at least satirical), and it has a far larger cast of characters. Having read it, the comparison I’d make is not with Devil’s Tor, but another novel from that same decade and also set in the southwest, weaving mysticism with the misty English landscape: John Cowper Powys’s A Glastonbury Romance.

First Light starts with the discovery of a seemingly unspoiled stone-age tumulus, surrounded by a wide stone circle in Pilgrin Valley, near the village of Colcorum. But although the gradual excavation of the tumulus over a period of several months provides a spine to the novel, its main focus is on a range of characters whose lives touch sometimes only slightly on the dig itself. At the same time as the dig is going on, for instance, astronomer Damian Fall (living in a cottage in Pilgrin Valley) is dealing with the realisation that he has long since ceased to feel the “exaltation” that drew him into the profession—he “once thought of the night sky as my home”, but now feels “like a priest who had lost his belief in God”. Meanwhile, a retired TV and music hall comedian, Joey Hanover, has come to the area, driven by the distant memory of a cottage where he spent his earliest years. Joey wants to find this cottage so he can learn who his parents were—a different and parallel sort of excavation of the past. And while the lead archaeologist, Mark Clare, deals with the dig, his wife, a “brooding, melancholy” young woman who wears a permanent brace on her leg, convinces her husband they should try to adopt a child, only to find that, as she’s registered disabled, it’s most likely she’ll be refused.

And there’s a range of characters who don’t have stories so much as a series of interactions, and form the more comic side of the novel. Foremost among these is Evangeline Tupper, whose position in the Department of the Environment has led to her being associated with the dig, despite her having no real feel for archaeology or, really, the environment. Outwardly overly enthusiastic about everything and everyone, she’s immediately viperish the moment anyone’s back is turned. She’s always commenting on how feminine her partner (always introduced as her “assistant”) Hermione is, but laconic Hermione is clearly not interested in being “feminine” at all. (It’s hard to tell if this is a joke the two share, or some barely-concealed sarcasm on Evangeline’s part.) Then there’s Julian Hill, the site’s environmentalist, full of theories about the significance of what they’re going to find at the dig (he has already written an article on how astronomers were “the leaders or at least the magi of late neolithic society”), and when this doesn’t prove immediately true, says his theory is right, it’s just the evidence that’s wrong.

Locals include Farmer Mint and his adult son, only ever called Boy. The Mints are the main local family, and Farmer Mint lives and works in Pilgrin Valley. Almost a caricature of the closemouthed but knowing local, he and his family turn out to have a knowledge of the tumulus and what it contains that they are not about to share. Then we have Brenda, secretary at the local observatory, who takes everything said to her as a suggestive remark; antiques shop owner and amateur actor Augustine Fraicheur, who camply proclaims the village to be utterly decadent compared to the “innocence” of London, and hints at dark goings-on; Lola Trout, an old woman whose dialogue is almost entirely comprised of profanity; and Michael, known as the Woodlander, a homeless man, intensely shy, who has taken it upon himself to be the guardian of the region’s flora and fauna.

While Powys’s tone and style in A Glastonbury Romance embrace every character and story, and pass effortlessly into his characters’ deepest thoughts and feelings, Ackroyd’s style in First Light seems to have two starkly different modes. He has a light, distant, satirical tone when dealing with this more comical characters, such as Evangeline, the Mints, Augustine and Brenda. But three of his characters—Mark, Kathleen, and Damian—are loaded with melancholy, and when we’re with them, it’s a heavy, elegiac tone that takes over. It’s as though the one genuine feeling of any depth Ackroyd is presenting us with is sadness; anything else is light and flighty and ironic. (Oddly, both tones work. The melancholy chapters can be genuinely moving, and the comic chapters can be amusing—I’d never say laugh-out-loud funny, but certainly amusing. It’s just odd to find these two tones, and nothing between, existing together in the same novel.)

There aren’t many moments when the two modes interact. When Brenda attempts her “Oh, you are awful!” style on deeply depressed Damian, it’s like water on an oilskin. The one exception, the character who seems able to exist in both worlds, is Joey Hanover. While he never plumbs the ultimately distressing depths of Damian and Kathleen, he at least has an inner need, presumably driven by some sort of unhappiness, to uncover the mystery of his birth. But, while Damian and Kathleen have no happy ending, Joey at least achieves his, and finds himself a new family in the process. He always has a song and a joke, whatever the situation, and I can’t help wondering if he’s Ackroyd’s example of a “survivor” character: just as ultra-cynical McReady is the perfect survivor for the environment of John Carpenter’s The Thing, so an ex-music hall comedian, armed with a stock of popular songs, is, somehow, the perfect survivor for the strange emotional environment of First Light, with its odd mix of human disconnection and distant yearning.

Mark, on the other hand, has the most hard-won story. At first craving some vision that will unveil the secrets of Pilgrin Valley’s ancient past, he’s later more desperately driven by the need to find some meaning in it all—not just the dig, but the tragedy that hits his life. Damian’s assistant Alec provides him with a clue, when talking about time and the patterns it makes: “I suppose that we could only see the pattern if we were outside it. And in that case we would have ceased to exist…” But Mark nevertheless manages to find some meaning in it all with the notion that we contain within ourselves the stuff of dead stars, linking each of us to the distant heavens, just as the dead within the tomb seem to be linked to distant Aldebaran. (The novel is all about striving to find meaningful, preferably human, connections: to other people, to the past, to the stars. It’s just that the failures to do so feel more profoundly felt than the few successes.)

It’s not as big or all-embracing a novel as A Glastonbury Romance, and I think there are hints that Ackroyd would never write such a book as Powys’s. While Powys brings in so many different characters, viewpoints, experiences and outlooks, and seems genuinely capable of grasping the whole of life in all its many facets, First Light is limited to those two tones, the satirical and the melancholy, and shows some repetition in its band of characters. Evangeline, as I’ve said, is overly enthusiastic but catty the moment anyone’s back is turned; so is the dig’s “finds” supervisor, Martha Wells, and so is Augustine Fraicheur. Either Ackroyd is trying to tell us something about how he believes people are, or he’s found a limit to his comic range.

Nevertheless, it’s an interesting novel, perhaps as much for its flaws as its many little moments of insight. It’s certainly not trying to say something as grand as either Devil’s Tor or A Glastonbury Romance, but is, I think, paddling in the shallows of the same great body of water those two plunge into: the matter of mystical Britain, and the broader, deeper stuff of human life.

As the 1970s moved towards the 1980s, and as punk rock replaced prog, it seems the inner city began to replace the countryside as the standard location for YA novels. Where formerly the natural world had been the more closely associated with childhood (endless summer holidays spent mucking around in fields), the inner city, with its more evident social problems, came to seem the more authentic, or at least relevant. Judy Allen’s first two YA books, The Spring on the Mountain and The Stones of the Moon, were firmly set not just in the country, but in the Earth Mysteries-flavoured country of Janet and Colin Bord’s Mysterious Britain—stone circles, ancient tracks, Merlin, Arthur, druids and so on. With her next two YA fantasies, Lord of the Dance (1976) and The Dream Thing (1980), the action moved to the town/city, and the fantasy element was no longer ancient forces in the landscape but dreams and the inner world.

(After writing on her first two YA fantasies a while back, I was hoping to review her next book, Lord of the Dance, but it’s been impossible to find a copy. Eventually, I gave in and read the ebook version that’s currently available, only to find something odd. It was originally published in 1976, but the ebook contained references to things like CDs and horror films on home video. I looked up some reviews for the original release, and even their brief plot summaries made me realise it must have been extensively rewritten at some point, presumably in the 1980s.)

The Dream Thing starts with its teen protagonist Jen sitting down to write a school essay about what matters most to her, and realising what she’s most concerned with is hate. Some gypsies have recently moved into a patch of unused land under a nearby motorway flyover, and she wants nothing more than for them to go away. She herself is half-gypsy—her father was a gypsy, though he was killed in a fight with his cousin before he could marry her mother, and before she herself was born—and now everyone at school is taunting her about “her relatives” having moved in, and asking if she’s going to join them.

She starts to have a frightening dream dominated by some monstrous thing, all sharp metal scales and a big tail spike. Convinced the gypsies (whom she early on confronts, telling them they’re not wanted round here) have put a curse on her—she also feels random sharp pains all the time, is convinced she’s going to die, and thinks she’s being followed—she draws this dream monster, in an attempt to work out what it might be. Having finished the drawing, she realises this dragon-like thing has no eye, so she puts one in, to finish it—and, like the old rabbi putting the final letter on the golem’s forehead, she feels something change, as though it has now come alive. Soon after, one of the gypsy caravans seems to have been attacked, with a large dent and suggestive scratches along its side, as though something big and rough had scraped against it.

Jen learns from her friend Tom (whose fascination with Native Americans, and his understanding of their persecution by European settlers, makes him sympathetic to the gypsies) that the land the travellers are on was bequeathed to the public over a century ago. Researching the exact wording of the bequest in the local library, she finds the land was actually given to the residents for their use, which, strictly speaking, excludes the gypsies; she brings the book to Tom’s and accidentally-on-purpose lets his parents (who are very much anti-gypsy) see it. Soon after, the police turn up in force to tell the gypsies to move on. They can’t immediately—one of them has recently given birth—so they’re given a week. Jen, weirdly open and honest about her dislike of them, takes the opportunity to let the head gypsy know that she was the one who provided the clue that meant they were going to have to move. But when she finds herself still gripped by nightmares of the dream-thing, her mother says the only thing to do is go to the gypsies and ask if they, with their knowledge of such things, can help.

Jen is plainly not what you’d call an entirely sympathetic character. Having decided it’s the gypsies’ fault she’s being bullied at school, she focuses entirely on wanting rid of them. In a way, the reader is left in the position of watching the car crash she’s making of the situation, how she’s letting this hatred of the gypsies take over her life, to the point where it acquires a supernatural life of its own. (And mentioning car crashes, I couldn’t help wondering if the patch of wasteland the gypsies occupy might be near the one where Maitland is stranded in Concrete Island, while Crash’s Robert Vaughan perhaps cruises by on the motorway above. Such hemmed-in remnants of the natural world took on a certain resonance in this time of cultural handover from countryside to city.)

But as an adult reader, I couldn’t help being aware of Jen as a troubled child (a teen, yes, but still a child) under serious pressure. The gypsies didn’t just kick off a spate of isolating bullying at school—which even her supposed friend Tom joins in with—their presence brings up Jen’s buried feelings about her father, whom she never knew, and his violent death. And all this is packed into the dream-thing: not only is it a scaly metal dragon-thing intent on attacking the gypsies, it’s also an armour-plated symbol of Jen’s own spiky self-protectiveness covering her emotional vulnerability. It’s also a thing that persecutes her, through nightmares and a sense that she’s being followed, just as this melange of hatred and fear is persecuting her. She’s a girl in serious need of guidance.

Her mother does make some attempts at help, but I can’t help feeling they’re woefully inadequate (though perhaps up to 1970s standards). Learning that Jen is being bullied at school, her mother says “they tease you because you rise to it”, as though it were basically her fault. In a midnight talk after one of Jen’s nightmares, after which Jen admits to feeling she’s going to die, her mother does at least talk about Jen’s father’s death, but goes on to say that Jen is too young to think about death and should just not do it. (Despite the fact that Jen’s father clearly died too young.) There’s a distinct sense of the adults giving one piece of cool advice, with an air of, “Well, I’ve told you how to deal with it, the rest is up to you.” (Jen’s best friend Tom, meanwhile, tells her “You share the Führer’s views on gypsies.” True—if exaggerated—but also perhaps a little unhelpful.) It’s the how of dealing with it that Jen clearly doesn’t have, and nobody guides her towards it.

Dream-fantasy like this, with a clear psychological grounding, can easily turn into straightforward allegory: Jen’s hatred of the gypsies gains a monstrous autonomy in the dream-thing dragon-scorpion whatever-it-is. Her hatred is monstrous, and the monster is her hatred. But that symbol, of the armour-plated spiky monster, has a lot more resonance than that—as I said above, it’s as much about Jen’s self-protection and self-persecution as it is her hatred. But I can’t help feeling that The Dream Thing resolves by treating it entirely as Jen’s hatred, and nothing else. The head gypsy tells her “Your dream… is born of your venom. It has nothing to do with us…” Which is perhaps a truth Jen needs to be told, but it’s also not the whole truth. The symbol of the dream-thing itself is far more eloquent than any of the reductive explanations, but there’s an air, at the end, of tying it to this too-simple explanation, and so leaving its many resonances unexplored. We’re left with a simple message: hate is bad, and it can take you over. But the roots of that hatred in fear and loss and isolation aren’t addressed.

(To give another example. Jen lives with her mother in a small flat, and the building is surrounded by a black metal fence with semi-ornamental spikes. The fence is only a short distance from the building itself, so what it’s protecting is a basically useless strip of land, and anyway, the fence can just be walked around, so its protecting nothing. It is, instead, an embodiment of the feelings people have about their homes, the need that they have a certain space around them, and an air of protection. In the limited space of a city, this has to be formalised into an ornamental fence and a tiny strip of land, but the psychological value is still there. The metal of the railings, and the spikes of the ornaments, clearly tie in with the metallic spikiness of the dream-thing, and bring out the feelings of self-protection rather than hatred in the dream-thing—though, such self-protection can also spill into hatred: the gypsies offer no threat, but so many people want them “not in my back yard”.)

I can’t help feeling that if the fantasy element had been given freer reign instead of being tied down to one interpretation, the ending might have been richer and more satisfying—a true resolution rather than a lesson only apparently learned. If, for instance, Jen had seen her own dream-thing in the metal/flesh, she might have seen herself in it, both her vulnerability and her spikiness. (A situation handled far better, and also with a dragon-sized thing of hate, disgust, and vulnerability, in William Mayne’s A Game of Dark.) But she doesn’t face it like that, it’s explained away. The fantasy loses its resonance, and becomes an allegory.

The Dream Thing’s ending does have a certain bleakness of realism. The gypsies are forced to move on. Jen’s friend Tom is no longer speaking to her, but she has a female friend in reserve, so it’s not the end of the world. It’s all part of the messiness of growing up.

It’s an interesting book, praised in its day for the realism of its characters, and certainly unafraid to take its main character through some uncomfortable emotions. It was reissued in 1990 (and, from a quick comparison of the text thanks to an Archive.org scan, it seems the same as the 1978 version, rather than being rewritten as with Lord of the Dance).