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Message: <blockquote data-quote="jian" data-source="post: 9836804" data-attributes="member: 78087">Joan Aiken is mostly known for her children’s books set in alternate Victorian England (The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, Black Hearts in Battersea, etc) but was also a very prolific writer who produced hundreds of novels and short stories. Many of her works have a characteristic, slightly surreal bent that is both fairy tale and macabre, often not really aiming to frighten you but make you feel and consider. This was probably the point of setting the Wolves books in an alternate history (James II was never deposed and the Hanoverian monarchy never happened) - it makes very little difference except to let her imagination run wild.I just read The People at the Castle, a relatively recent collection of her lesser known short stories, and they were quite fascinating and nothing is ever really explained, with fairy-tale logic in the most mundane (mostly England in the 1960s or so) settings. I’ll be reading more of her work.(Aiken also wrote actual fairy tales, my favourite is A Harp of Fishbones.)</blockquote>