Jimbo: A Fantasy

Jimbo is a boy whose inner life is vast and strange, but the adults around him see only mischief and nonsense. His father views imagination as an obstacle to be stamped out, and a cold governess is hired specifically to crush his dreams. She uses the ominous empty house next door as a weapon, filling a sensitive child's mind with tales of malevolent things that lurk in the dark. The terror she cultivates nearly destroys him. But when Jimbo suffers a near-fatal accident, he finds himself drifting free of his body, slipping through what the book calls the Gates of Sleep into an Enchanted Land where the rules of reality no longer apply. There he meets the mysterious Dweller and other strange companions, learning that the imaginative world he was punished for inhabiting is more real, more consequential, than the cold nursery where he was taught to deny himself. Blackwood, better known for his horror tales, wrote this with genuine tenderness for the creative child besieged by uncomprehending adults. It is both a gothic nightmare and a dream of liberation.