Grimbold's Other World

Reprint, reprint, O publishers, the enchanting tale of Muffler and Grimbold!

Muffler is a foundling. As a baby he was discovered in a hen's nest, wrapped in the white silk scarf that gave him his name. Although he is raised by a good-hearted farming family, it becomes clear early on that Muffler is no farmer. He is kind and gentle, but his feet are fixed firmly on a cloud, and he spends much of his time daydreaming, composing stories, songs and poems.

While suffering through a cold brought on by too much time in the rain, Muffler is visited by a great black cat named Grimbold. The cat leads him through one of many gaps and gates into the night-world, a parallel land where dreams and magic rule. Muffler's inherent goodness and honesty keep him relatively safe in the beautiful, dangerous night-world, but he soon discovers that the gaps open in both directions, and sometimes beings from the other world—benign and otherwise—slip through into our own. Although Muffler eventually returns to the normal world, the magic of his poems and songs has given him the ability to slip between our world and the world of dreams—and his life is forever changed.

Nicholas Stuart Gray, a Scottish dramatist and fantasy author, was quite prolific in the 1960s and '70s, but his work has since fallen out of favor and thus out of print. This is a real shame; he had a lovely, timeless storytelling voice, similar to Hans Christian Andersen and Charles Perrault, but with rich description and more adult overtones. His poems also pepper this book, and while he's not about to give W.B. Yeats a run for his money, Gray's ballads create a kind of verbal bracket to enclose and summarize each chapter. My only real criticism of this book is its brevity—Gray created a marvelous world, and at just under 200 pages, the tale ended far too soon.

All material displayed on this website is © 2001-2009 by S. B. Houghton, writing under the alias "The Pirate King." All rights reserved.
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