Alan Garner's The Owl Service … reveals that he is not a man to rest on the laurels awarded him by those enthusiastic children who read with pleasure The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, The Moon of Gomrath, and Elidor. For The Owl Service … is entirely different from his other three, having in common with them only that it is fantasy and takes off from legend. But because certain of Garner's tendencies as a writer are noticeable in all of his books and because these tendencies play an...

In Alan Garner's story the moon of Gomrath rises over an unmistakably British countryside and over a hidden, ageless underworld of frighteningly evil powers and almost equally fearsome champions of the good…. ["The Moon of Gomrath"] jumps abruptly from one Tolkienish shiver to another, but there is a gripping power to these episodes of creeping horror, reminiscent of those in Charles Williams' adult novels of the occult. Andrew B. Myers, "New Books for ...

Alan Garner's four novels find the source of their inspiration in non-classical mythology and all contain elements of fantasy…. For Alan Garner there are no original stories: 'originality now means the personal colouring of existing themes, and some of the richest ever expressed are in the folklore of Britain.' (Note to The Moon of Gomrath.) For example, Elidor combines the story of Childe Roland with, among other things, the Irish myth of the Tuatha Dé Danaan who came fro...

[The] technique of the great adventure with spiritual or allegorical undertones breaking through into everyday life has been employed …, with considerable success, by Alan Garner in The Weirdstone of Brisingamen (1960) and The Moon of Gomrath (1963). But here the adventure tends to grow too titanic, the powers to belong to a greater and more heroic world, such as that created by Tolkien in The Lord of the Rings; and exciting though the stories are, they tend to lose that sense of the actual and the c...