WILD ROBERT

Wild Robert provides the fizz in this outing from master fantasist Jones, the first US edition of a 1989 novella. Heather is significantly put out by living at Castlemaine, the stately home where her mum and dad are curators, and where, every morning, the tourists descend, driving Heather out. When she seeks solitude at the legendary grave of the witch, Wild Robert, she compounds her miseries tenfold by inadvertently summoning him. Charismatic, determined, and thoroughly wicked, in short order he has turned the older tourists into sheep and randy teenagers into satyrs, and has menaced a group of schoolchildren with monstrous frozen treats—but Heather finds the results of Wild Robert’s magic more alarming than appealing for all its aptness. The brevity of the story limits the action to one day—the effective period of Wild Robert’s magic—but it’s a busy one, at the end of which both Heather and the reader will see the pathos behind Wild Robert’s frenetic chaos. Minor Jones to be sure, but still entirely intelligent and engaging. (Fiction. 8-12)