It was an interesting way to explore the rivalries between brothers and sisters, older and younger, first and second. And for once, her brother was at her mercy. In fact she beginning to enjoy being the queen of this place that she could control. So far so good, but then the book twisted, as books sometimes do.Ĭhloe took over.

Rob meets Vetch, a man who claims to have been around when Darkhenge was built, and he offers to take Rob through it to rescue Chloe, who is a prisoner in the Unworld, which might be another dimension, or the labyrinth of her own mind.

She falls from her horse and is in a deep coma. Rob, a very successful boy, who’s never really had any problems, has a younger, rather overlooked sister called Chloe. So a story with an ancient wooden henge that might be a portal to the Unworld was always going to be set here- in fact I worked out the idea when walking from Avebury to Marlborough one spring day. Not only that, the wide open downland is magic. The landscape is littered with prehistoric mysteries- the great henge at Avebury, the dark burial chamber at West Kennet, the lost circles and timber palisades, and the wonderful, intriguing mound Silbury Hill. I love to go walking over the downs at Avebury, in Wiltshire. For Chloe, indulging the deadly sin of envy will prove more deadly to her than anybody else, a fact underlined by the mutually destructive ongoing indulgence of Ceridwen’s wrath toward Taliesin… But the stronger her will becomes, the greater the danger that she will trap herself, alone, in the caers of the Unworld and never return to her body outside. It is easy to sympathize with Chloe’s desire to define herself, and difficult not to groan at Rob’s blundering inability to see beyond his own idea of her. In Annwn, finally in control of her circumstances, Chloe begins to realize her power, only to become intoxicated by it. Chloe, it seems, unconsciously summoned the king through her desire to escape from an existence lived in the shadow of her popular and high-achieving brother. Rob believes he is going to rescue his sister from the King of Annwn, a chivalric quest that comes to an ingnominious halt when she refuses to be rescued.

Darkhenge by Catherine Fisher