Eight Days of Luke; Archer's Goon

Eight Days of Luke first appeared in 1975 and Archer's Goon nine years later but they are as freshly fantastic as ever, just waiting, with their new covers and illustrations, to intrigue the next generation of readers. What is particularly engaging is the way the ordinary just opens into the extraordinary and vice versa so that we have gods treading the earth. In Eight Days of Luke David curses his grotesque relatives oppressively in charge of his grey, parentless world and releases Luke, a fugitive from an underworld, and from then on he finds himself having to prove Luke's innocence to his pursuers, led by Mr Wedding. The excitement is continuous and works on many levels so that the present day adventures are also the replaying of Norse myths where Luke is Loki. Archer's Goon has an even more vivid present and a family home which is broken into literally by the arguments of another god-like family. The mystery here is even more intriguing, the humour more playful and these 'gods' even more physically real - starting with Archer's Goon himself. There is a mazy series of twists in the plot as Howard also tries to solve the mystery - what has kept the fantastic five brothers and sisters, caught up in this place for so long - but here finds himself more deeply involved than he or we can have imagined. These titles dwarf the Harry Potter books, and there is a wonderful vein of humour in them, but maybe Potter readers will have to find their way to Wynne Jones and discover that for themselves.