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The Edge of the World
Two young people set out on a dangerous quest which takes them from their English countryside to a strange desert world.
- GenresFantasy
186 pages, Library Binding
First published January 1, 1983
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25 people want to read
About the author
John Gordon
38 books28 followersLibrarian note:
There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name
John Gordon was an English writer of adolescent supernatural fiction. He was the author of fifteen fantasy novels (including The Giant Under The Snow), four short story collections, over fifty short stories, and a teenage memoir. For more information, please see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gor...
There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name
John Gordon was an English writer of adolescent supernatural fiction. He was the author of fifteen fantasy novels (including The Giant Under The Snow), four short story collections, over fifty short stories, and a teenage memoir. For more information, please see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gor...
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
June 24, 2025
Kit hauled Tekker back, and saw the Horsehead above them. Its bony snout dipped as the blank sockets searched. Then it was gone. 'It might have seen us,' she said.And the inside has:
The thought should have made them afraid, but they grinned at each other and then snarled like cats, face to face. They dared risk anything.
Tekker had seen a ghost. Nobody believed him except Kit, and she did not want anyone else to know. Especially not Dan, her brother.
But one day Dan sees something which draws him into the mystery with terrifying results. Kit and Tekker have to set out on a quest to save him, a quest which is dangerous, but strangely beautiful - and which takes them to the edge of the world.
'There ain't no such thing as ghost,' said Wilf Piggins. But Kit Huntley and pugnacious Tekker Begdale know better. They saw a ghost behind old Ma Grist's house at the end of Mr Huntley's orchard - a creature with a horse's skull. Between them they stumble into a strange and terrifying desert land and, unintentionally, involve Kit's infuriating and disbelieving brother Dan, whose life becomes endangered.
Enemies, fear and awe lurk around every corner as Tekker and Kit search for the one person in that desert land who can save Dan's life.
So there's this forum called, What's the Name of that Book?!. I like to go there and see if I can help out, on occasion. Unfortunately, it has this tendency to throw books into my path, and then I'm just too curious to not look into them... and probably order them online if I can get them cheaply.
I went to that forum again to try to find the thread that tipped me off about this book, The Edge of the World, and I couldn't find it. I was convinced that it had been mentioned in a thread aboout Seaward by the wonderful Susan Cooper, but I couldn't find that thread. Weirdly, these two books have quite a lot of overlap in re: a young male and female in a fantasy land and impossible desert and impossibly high cliffs to scale and spidery-legged creatures in the desert... and yet they are completely different stories... which both came out in 1983, coincidentally. I wonder if Gordon and Cooper were inspired by the same things..! (I'm just going to mention The Transall Saga by Gary Paulsen now. It came later, 1998, but it's another weird portal desert YA read, and hey, maybe it'll help someone out. The Eclipse of the Century by Jan Mark is also weird and desert-y, and it came out in 1999. I loved it).
Back to the story at hand - the setting is a village in fenland Cambridgeshire near Wisbech (the main character's surname is Begdale, which IRL is very near to Wisbech, so...!), and Terence "Tekker" Begdale and Kit Huntley (female) are the main characters. There's also a gaggle of local teens in the mix: Kit's self-assured older brother Dan; bully Wilf Piggins and his hangers-on; Betty Sutton, rival female, etc.; and a handful of elderly inhabitants of the village.
Tekker is a feisty, imaginative young rascal of a youth, and is countered mostly by the hyper-rational Dan who enjoys winding up "Young Begdale" who he views as an exaggerating child prone to flights of fancy. And in the opening chapter, we discover what Tekker's latest yarn is about - a ghost in the orchard near Ma Grist's place. Much teenage bickering, dares and scraps and posturing ensue, but Tekker's not letting this ghost sighting go. In fact, he's now claiming he's able to perform acts of telekinesis (though not in so many words). More bickering, more angsty teenage politics, but Tekker refuses to back down. And now Kit's in on it, too. And so is old man John Welbeck. And Dan's insistence on finding a rational explanation to the increasingly bizarre shared experiences by all are getting stretched rather thin.
'There's always something just beyond the edge of things, and sometimes you learn the trick of getting there.'Just when I thought the plot was settling down a bit, it plunged whole-hog into utter weirdness, and an alien red desert with a WWI Bristol Scout plane wreck and sinister horseheaded man-like skeletons suddenly seemed pretty normal in contrast. I don't even want to elaborate further - you're just going to have to track this book down, or try to guess from the random lists I've slotted this onto, and the following key words: bog oak, infinite chasms, jealousy, glass boats and invisible towers. I can happily report that this is almost totally devoid of romance, a rare occurrence in a YA book with a male and female pair.
'It was me who told you that. I got us here.'
'I know,' she said. 'But I'm here now.' It was as though she had just realised it. She turned towards him. 'Not many manage it, Tekker.'
'There's not many mad enough to try.'
John Gordon is our 2025 Author of the Year in the Forgotten Vintage Children's Lit We Want Republished group (please feel free to join us to discuss late but great juvenile stories from yesteryear, and to get some hot tips on which bargain books to seek out on the booming secondhand market, i.e. via bookfinder.com). I can't wait to discuss the ending with fellow member Rose.. :D
March 26, 2022
The Edge of the World by John Gordon
The Edge of the World is a YA fantasy novel first published in 1983. It primarily tells the story of Tekker and his friend Kit, who discover that through moving small objects with their minds (telekinesis) they are able to open up a parallel dimension in the English Fenlands. However, the parallel world is far from being a marsh, but is a burning-hot barren red desert from which ‘horseheads’ emerge. These nightmarish creatures have empty horses skulls, but walk upright on two legs.
Although they are warned not to open the parallel dimension by an old man who once went there and lost what was dearest to him, Kit and Tekker are forced to do so when the controller of the horseheads, a reclusive local woman, harms the mind of Kit’s brother, Dan, and he slips into a coma-like state and then nearer and nearer to death. The only way to undo the damage is to restore a key artifact to the possession of someone who is imprisoned beyond the desert.
The Edge of the World has all the characteristics of the most gripping adventure stories, and the world-building is sublime. The reader can really become immersed in the story and feel the experiences through the eyes of the protagonists, who are fully fleshed-out complex characters. The paradoxical antagonism and attraction between Tekker and Kit is handled particularly well.
I noticed similarities between this book and the more well-known The Giant Under the Snow. Apart from the tense atmosphere, the sneeringly skeptical character of Dan reminded me of Arf from the latter book. At one point, Arf tries to convince himself that nothing is stalking him in the forest by rationalizing the movement he sees as the nearer trees sliding over a background of those further away as he walks forward. In The Edge of the World, the same device is used with the boulders in the desert.
"She was sure the heads had moved. 'Wait!' She held his arm. The rounded shapes, many as tall as themselves, lay still. She had been tricked by the way they overlapped."
John Gordon's writing is highly incisive and the plot is fast-paced, immersive and exciting. The interaction between the characters is realistic, and the juxtaposition of the real world and the parallel dimension adds to the surreal nature of the imagery. Most books of this ilk end with the parallel world eventually being closed off forever from those who had visited it, but Gordon adroitly avoids this cliche in his finale.
The only details which date the book to the era in which it was written are Tekker's occasional slightly disparaging comments about girls, and the part where they decide to try hitchhiking to get back to their home village. Hitchhiking children and teens seem to appear quite often in novels from the 1960s and 1970s.
I must say that I enjoyed this book more than The Giant Under the Snow, and that I would recommend it to anyone who enjoys good fantasy literature and is not too disturbed by a touch of horror.
Below is a sampling of quotations from the story which highlight the high quality of the writing and story content:
"'I think just about anything's possible, Kit. You've only got to learn the knack.'"
“‘My trade. French polisher. Spent most of my life putting a shine on things and that’s a kind of deception. It can fool you. Look at the top of this table and you don’t see a table. There’s the window, see?’ He pointed at its reflection. ‘And the ceiling. And then deeper down a kind of darkness, like a pool. Deep. Dark. Anything could be there.’
Kit wanted him to stop. She could see the darkness, but the pit was in the old man’s mind, dragging her in.”
"'There's always something just beyond the edge of things, and sometimes you learn the trick of getting there.'"
“A wall of sheer glass rose straight upwards – a sheet so pure it was like clear water falling from the roof of the sky, but hanging motionless like time stopped, burning with a burst of sun at its base but glistening so high overhead it could have been stars. It had a knife-edge. It seemed too tall to stand. It seemed to sing with the sheer effort of standing in the sky.”
The Edge of the World is a YA fantasy novel first published in 1983. It primarily tells the story of Tekker and his friend Kit, who discover that through moving small objects with their minds (telekinesis) they are able to open up a parallel dimension in the English Fenlands. However, the parallel world is far from being a marsh, but is a burning-hot barren red desert from which ‘horseheads’ emerge. These nightmarish creatures have empty horses skulls, but walk upright on two legs.
Although they are warned not to open the parallel dimension by an old man who once went there and lost what was dearest to him, Kit and Tekker are forced to do so when the controller of the horseheads, a reclusive local woman, harms the mind of Kit’s brother, Dan, and he slips into a coma-like state and then nearer and nearer to death. The only way to undo the damage is to restore a key artifact to the possession of someone who is imprisoned beyond the desert.
The Edge of the World has all the characteristics of the most gripping adventure stories, and the world-building is sublime. The reader can really become immersed in the story and feel the experiences through the eyes of the protagonists, who are fully fleshed-out complex characters. The paradoxical antagonism and attraction between Tekker and Kit is handled particularly well.
I noticed similarities between this book and the more well-known The Giant Under the Snow. Apart from the tense atmosphere, the sneeringly skeptical character of Dan reminded me of Arf from the latter book. At one point, Arf tries to convince himself that nothing is stalking him in the forest by rationalizing the movement he sees as the nearer trees sliding over a background of those further away as he walks forward. In The Edge of the World, the same device is used with the boulders in the desert.
"She was sure the heads had moved. 'Wait!' She held his arm. The rounded shapes, many as tall as themselves, lay still. She had been tricked by the way they overlapped."
John Gordon's writing is highly incisive and the plot is fast-paced, immersive and exciting. The interaction between the characters is realistic, and the juxtaposition of the real world and the parallel dimension adds to the surreal nature of the imagery. Most books of this ilk end with the parallel world eventually being closed off forever from those who had visited it, but Gordon adroitly avoids this cliche in his finale.
The only details which date the book to the era in which it was written are Tekker's occasional slightly disparaging comments about girls, and the part where they decide to try hitchhiking to get back to their home village. Hitchhiking children and teens seem to appear quite often in novels from the 1960s and 1970s.
I must say that I enjoyed this book more than The Giant Under the Snow, and that I would recommend it to anyone who enjoys good fantasy literature and is not too disturbed by a touch of horror.
Below is a sampling of quotations from the story which highlight the high quality of the writing and story content:
"'I think just about anything's possible, Kit. You've only got to learn the knack.'"
“‘My trade. French polisher. Spent most of my life putting a shine on things and that’s a kind of deception. It can fool you. Look at the top of this table and you don’t see a table. There’s the window, see?’ He pointed at its reflection. ‘And the ceiling. And then deeper down a kind of darkness, like a pool. Deep. Dark. Anything could be there.’
Kit wanted him to stop. She could see the darkness, but the pit was in the old man’s mind, dragging her in.”
"'There's always something just beyond the edge of things, and sometimes you learn the trick of getting there.'"
“A wall of sheer glass rose straight upwards – a sheet so pure it was like clear water falling from the roof of the sky, but hanging motionless like time stopped, burning with a burst of sun at its base but glistening so high overhead it could have been stars. It had a knife-edge. It seemed too tall to stand. It seemed to sing with the sheer effort of standing in the sky.”
October 14, 2019
4.5 stars. Ranks nearly as high for me as Gordon's masterpiece The House on the Brink… and the lesser-known The Quelling Eye.
Gordon's young adult adventures are on the dark side, but in the best way possible. And he fills his tales with adventure and an enchanting obscurity near to being mystical. This one has a science fiction flavor to it--but he's the idiosyncratic sort of author who really creates a genre of his own.
Some readers will certainly want more explanation for the weird goings-on, more answers, but I prefer Gordon's poetic ambiguity. There is a fine line to walk with this sort of thing, and he has a wonderful sense for steering between Too Much and Too little.
Gordon's young adult adventures are on the dark side, but in the best way possible. And he fills his tales with adventure and an enchanting obscurity near to being mystical. This one has a science fiction flavor to it--but he's the idiosyncratic sort of author who really creates a genre of his own.
Some readers will certainly want more explanation for the weird goings-on, more answers, but I prefer Gordon's poetic ambiguity. There is a fine line to walk with this sort of thing, and he has a wonderful sense for steering between Too Much and Too little.
October 10, 2012
It took me quite a while to be sure the primary setting was actually the real-world England and not some alternative or post-apocalyptic world. The characters' behavior and interactions didn't really make sense to me, nor the background plot. It was certainly imaginative, though.
May 2, 2017
This is another British juvenile science fiction writer who either didn't write much or not many of his books were published in the U.S. I love his stuff!
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews