So when in 1999, towards the end of my second decade of life, Jarvis published the first volume of a new series, Thorn Ogres of Hagwood, I was not surprised to find that it was good. ( Redwall, alas, was not, so I am happy to write off that portion of my youth and caricature the books as pseudo-medieval mouse adventures that involve a lot of sitting around eating pie with otters.) I re-read the original series in my teens when the final of three prequels, Thomas, was published in 1995 and was pleased to find that they were everything I had remembered. The trilogy was then concluded by the appropriately titled The Final Reckoning (1990). I still vividly remember the trauma of its ravishing unfairness on my preteen psyche. The second book, The Crystal Prison (also published in 1989), then ramps up the terror by making the threat as much psychological as physical, using Arthur Miller's The Crucible as template. Frankly, Cluny the Scourge would have cacked his pants. One of the pagan rats has a potato peeler lashed to the stump of his arm, except it is called a mouse peeler and he is called Skinner and yes, this is a kids' book where happy little mice get flayed. I loved those books too but the Deptford Mice trilogy was on a different level. Far from family and friends he perishes, and in so doing is the unwitting trigger of a chain of events which hurtle the Deptford Mice into a doom-laden world of terror and sorcery.īloody hell! At the time, the benchmark for mouse stories was Brian Jacques's Redwall series (the first book was published in 1986 and Jacques managed pretty much a book a year until his death in 2010). Into this twilight realm wanders a small and frightened mouse. The rats worship it in the blackness and name it Jupiter, Lord of All. In the sewers of Deptford there lurks a dark presence which fills the tunnels with fear. I am going to quote the whole thing because I still find it pretty remarkable: Picking it off the shelf, however, I discovered something rather more alluring on the back cover blurb. On paper it is nothing remarkable, an anthropomorphic children's fantasy of the sort that are ten-a-penny in any school library. In 1989, towards the end of my first decade of life, Robin Jarvis published The Dark Portal, the first volume of the Deptford Mice trilogy.

The final reckoning robin jarvis