Paul Stewart & Chris Riddell // Doubleday // Out Now
The Edge Chronicles: The Lost Bark Scrolls on Amazon
In a nutshell: Collection of four tales set in the world of Stewart and Riddell’s best-selling The Edge Chronicles.
The Edge is a vast, floating island, over whose rocky edges waterfalls plummet into nothingness; a flat Earth, of sorts, above which magnificent Sky Galleons clash in battle with pirates, monsters and other mysterious forces. It is also, more importantly, the setting for Paul Stewart and Chris Riddell’s best selling fantasy series, The Edge Chronicles.
Already stretching to nine books, across three trilogies (or ’sagas’, as the authors would have it) charting the lives of three generations of the adventurous Verginix family, The Edge Chronicles is a complex and detailed epic, for which the Edge is itself provides a suitably vivid and well-imagined setting. Collected here are four tales from the Edge, telling stories from across the several generations of history the Chronicles have so described.
‘Cloud Wolf’ is the tale of a young Quint’s first battle in the sky, aboard the ship of his father, Wind Jackal; essentially a prequel to the Quint Saga.
‘The Stone Pilot’ is the tale of Maugin, the mysterious creature who tends the flight-rock at the sky galleon’s heart, keeping the vast ship afloat. Like ‘Cloud Wolf’, this novella was originally published as an exclusive World Book Day story.
‘The Slaughterer’s Quest’ features Keris, the daughter of Twig (and hence granddaughter of Quint) as she attempts to uncover the truth about her father’s fate.
‘The Blooding of Rufus Filatine’ is the first story to feature the title character, Rufus, a Freeglade Lancer, in what seems to be only the beginning of his adventures…
A fold-out timeline included in The Lost Bark Scrolls handily recounts the history of the edge and many readers will be familiar with the intervening episodes in the chronology, but it is nonetheless something of a mystery why these four particular stories should be included together here. It sometimes seems that collections like this are really the wish of author’s and publishers more than they meet any real demand from the readers; a giddy rush to publish a bigger, thicker book, where the previous slender volumes were in fact quite adequate.
There’s nothing to really connect the four stories here – indeed, their unrelatedness is used as an apparent selling point – and while for the complete anorak there’s something appealing about the idea of a book that taps into the whole, multi-generational depth of the longer series, for anyone else it can prove somewhat frustrating. These stories are pivotal, not to each other, but to the separate trilogies to which they form prequel, sequel or companion and perhaps belong with those parent trilogies where their strengths would best be shown. But, at the end of the day, while the stories themselves are not the very best of the Edge Chronicles’ numerous instalments, they are of the consistently high quality Stewart and Riddell have set for the series thus far. Readers eager for more from the Edge will lap these up, but the feeling remains they might have been better served if offered these enjoyable tales in their proper place, which is somewhere other than here.
