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Cross, Gillian

Entry updated 12 September 2022. Tagged: Author.

(1945-    ) UK author, primarily for children, in various genres, including the Demon Headmaster sequence of horror tales [see Checklist below]. Of sf interest are Born of the Sun (1983), in which the search for an Incan Lost World intersects with family romance; New World (1992), in which adventures within a Virtual Reality world turn nightmarish; Pictures in the Dark (1996), about the consequences of the protagonist's photographing an unknown animal; and the Dark Ground sequence of Young Adult sf – comprising Dark Ground (2004) and The Black Room (2005) – whose protagonist suffers Miniaturization, which is accomplished by a process which takes him out of his "zombie" body, and discovers other adolescents in the same plight, with no clue as to what scientific process has extracted them from their full-size bodies, and to what end. Cross is a capable and flexible writer whose works increasingly unfold in darkness: the vision of entrapment presented in her Dark Ground books hauntingly conveys a sense of the trammels of life. [JC]

see also: Carnegie Medal.

Gillian Clare Cross

born London: 24 December 1945

works (selected)

series

Demon Headmaster

Dark Ground

  • Dark Ground (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) [Dark Ground: hb/Paul Young]
  • The Black Room (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005) [Dark Ground: hb/Paul Young]
  • The Nightmare Game (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006) [Dark Ground: hb/Jonathan Barkat]

individual titles

links

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