The Stones are Hatching

By: Geraldine McCaughrean

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Paperback | 1 July 2000

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Phelim was the only one, they said, the only one who could save the world from the Hatchlings of the Stoor Worm. The Stoor Worm, who had been asleep for aeons, since it was vanquished by the hero, Assipattle, was beginning to waken. It was the booming of the guns, the cries of the wounded, the dreadful sounds of war that had woken it, and now its Hatchlings were abroad to terrorize the people who had forgotten all about them, forgotten all the ancient magics. But how could Phelim, who was only a boy, after all, save the world from all these dreadful monsters? And where could he find the Maiden, the Fool, and the Horse who were supposed to help him? And as Phelim leaves his home and sets out on his quest, the words of the domovoy ring in his ears: 'You are the one. To stop the Worm waking. To do what must be done.' Geraldine McCaughrean is a best-selling author who has won the Carnegie Medal, the Whitbread Children's Novel Award (twice), and the Guardian Children's Fiction Award. "The Stones Are Hatching" is now reissued in a smaller mass-market paperback format.

Industry Reviews

McCaughrean (Pirates Son, 1999, etc.) sends a lad through as fine an array of malign faeries, usteys, corn wives, soul-stealing merrows, skinless muckelavees, and other deadly bogles as ever lurked in Celtic folklore, in hopes of slaying a dragon literally half the size of Wales. It all comes upon 11-year-old Phelim suddenly, when his homes supernatural guardian, the Domovoy, appears, calling him Jack OGreen and insisting that he better get a move on. It seems that the guns of the WWI have not only disturbed the 2,000-year sleep of the Stoor Worm that lies along the Welsh coast, but have set her stone eggs to hatching out all the creatures of nightmare to boot. Frightened and mystified but gaining confidence as he goes, Phelim acquires some unlikely companionsAlexia, a young witch; Sweeney, a soldier driven mad in the Napoleonic Wars; and for transportation, a headless, ungainly Obby Oss. He narrowly escapes death several times, and learns what he needs to know from his adventures to accomplish his seemingly hopeless task. McCaughrean creates a world turned upside down, in which creatures thought safely tucked away in entertaining legends assume terrifying reality, and old local blood rites are revived in self defense: as the Obby Oss says, Magic is not nice. Magics wuz never nice. Nor, as it turns out, is Phelim, quite, for at the end he dispatches his trollish big sister to the ends of the earth on a water sprites back for placing their father, the real Jack O'Green, into an asylum. Despite the distracting family subplot, not since William Maynes Hob and the Goblins (1994) has the Old Magic risen in the modern world with such resounding menace. (Fiction. 11-13) (Kirkus Reviews)

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