Cougar Canyon Book

This was one of my all-time favourite books as a kid and I've had a blast re-reading it to my daughter. It tells the tale of a group of anthropomorphic mice living in an empty house in Deptford. (The fact that it's such a particular suburb - not just a random house in London somewhere - is one of the things I've always liked about this book.)

The mice live a relatively happy life, except for the fact that down in the cellar is the Grill - an old piece of ironwork that leads into the sewers. And in the sewers live the incredibly vicious rats and their dark god, Jupiter, who mostly appears as a pair of glowing red eyes burning out from the dark portal of the title. At the beginning of the book, Albert Brown, the father of two mouse children, wanders into the sewers, for no reason that he can fathom. (Drawn on by the dark enchantments of the Grill.) He unfortunately doesn't make it alive past chapter one, but his death is then the trigger for all the action that takes place in the rest of the book.

From them on, it's an increasingly gripping read. It's hard to remember that when this came out back in 1989, the young adult phenomenon had yet to take off and so books for kids were largely of the Roald Dahl and Paul Jennings variety - larger-than-life, slightly fluffy and mostly ridiculous. But Jarvis' idea of storytelling was far different. His villains are truly vile - some of the most violent, evil characters to ever march across the pages of a children's book. But, in making the opposition so dark, it increases the peril that is facing his small vulnerable heroes. (And what could be more small and vulnerable than a mouse?)

So the end result was probably a book that would have been rather darker than the average children's book at the time, but now in this day of multiple dystopian series for teens, is yet another series on the shelf that gets crowded out by Hunger Games and Maze Runners and so forth. So, sadly, The Deptford Mice trilogy are mostly out of print in hard copy, which means that the world has lost Robin Jarvis' amazing illustrations (one per chapter) which he did himself. Clearly, his visual imagination was as energetic as his written imagination (in fact, The Dark Portal started as a series of sketches), because for me, the illustrations looked *exactly* like the story described in them, and made the words come to life.

That said, if you can forgo the illustrations, the trilogy has been re-released for a very reasonable price on Kindle, so hunt them down if you get a chance.

The end result is a story that I definitely wouldn't recommend for any children under the age of 8 or 9 (and even then). But for those brave enough to try it, I'd wholly recommend it.

His characters are so well drawn that even after all these years, I still consider Arthur and Audrey Brown, Twit, Piccadilly, Thomas Triton and Oswald old friends and I'm always happy to revisit them myself and introduce them to others.

And in this day and age, a bunch of diminutive heroes who stand up against evil - not because they have any superpowers or because they're dashing and brave, but just simply because it's the right thing to do - these are the kind of heroes I would like to see more of.