ABSTRACT
In Alan Garner's 1973 young adult novel Red Shift, young couple Tom and Jan arrange to meet in the small town of Crewe. Tom is troubled by the apparent power of an ever-growing commodity culture to render him and Jan insubstantial, useless, hungry, as if they were ghosts. They might occupy the same space as the brand name shops in all their convenience and modernity, but their bodies apparently remain distant. Tom's complaint resonates with the growing gloom that characterized popular British discourses on society, culture and the imminent future in the early seventies, but also illuminates problems that inform Garner's earlier work, including his 1960 debut The Weirdstone of Brisingamen and its 1963 sequel, The Moon of Gomrath. Garner's claim places his own work in the tradition of boundary marking and navigation, calling the first two novels of the Weirdstone trilogy his '"boundary" books'. Certainly, the concerns of hauntology characterize the novels of the Weirdstone trilogy.
