Henry Brocken by Walter de la Mare

One of the things I miss from my childhood reading days is the sense of wild possibilities. That a nickel picked up on the sidewalk or a pebble with a hole might turn out to be a wishing charm, that an unusual wind might ruffle a curtain in time and let me step into some peculiar parallel world. Part of it, too, was the feeling that the characters I met in books were so vivid they must be somehow really real, living in some elsewhere place. And that’s the the premise of this book, written in 1904. Henry Brocken half believes that the characters he has loved in fiction must actually exist, and one day, riding on his uncle’s horse, Dulcinea (IYKYK), he finds himself in a subtly sinister realm beyond the reaches of the ordinary where Jane Eyre and Rochester, Sleeping Beauty and Gulliver, not to mention the peoples of Bunyan’s Pilgrims Progress and Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream live in a sort of suspended reality, their stories over or half-told. As his journey grows more extreme and fantastic, he faces a life-altering temptation, leaving the reader to question whether knowing how the story ends is really a gift after all.