Alan Garner's writing is marked by hard thinking and hard, fierce imagining. These have been brought to bear upon a distinctive choice of subject: the meeting-plane of two contiguous worlds. One is the world that most of us agree to describe, however inadequately, as ordinary, everyday, or by some such term. The other is the world of folklore and myth, dream and nightmare and vision. The wall between these two worlds is tough, but of less than tissue-paper thinness. Where the thinness can be worn into a transparency or where the unusual pressure of one world bursts its way into the other, there is the beginning of a Garner story.

In The Weirdstone of Brisingamen and The Moon of Gomrath, which can be considered as consecutive parts of the same story, the two worlds were unequally balanced: the weight of the reader's interest was with the other world...