Marco Books in Order

The Marco books are Phil Rickman’s venture into younger territory, written under the name Thom Madley but very much rooted in the same haunted landscapes as his adult novels. Aimed at roughly early-teen readers, they follow thirteen-year-old Marco as he stumbles into the deeper, stranger side of Glastonbury.

In Marco's Pendulum, Marco is sent from London to spend the summer with his grandparents in Glastonbury. Woolly and Nancy are ageing hippies who have thrown themselves wholeheartedly into the town’s myths about King Arthur, the Holy Grail and the old Isle of Avalon. Marco expects boredom and embarrassment; instead he is handed a pendulum and taught to dowse. The more he practises, the more he senses something wrong beneath the town’s New Age gloss, particularly once a development company starts talking about theme parks and “improving” sacred sites.

Along the way he meets Rosa, the new curate’s daughter, who is having unsettling experiences of her own in a house that backs onto the abbey ruins. The book mixes school-holiday mishaps and awkward family dynamics with creeping hints of real magic, asking how far you can go in exploiting legend before the place itself seems to push back.

The sequel, Marco and the Blade of Night, raises the stakes. When Rosa drags a rusted sword from the river, rumours flare that Excalibur has been found. Different groups – commercial interests, spiritual seekers, and those with darker motives – try to control the blade, seeing it as a symbol that can rally money, faith or power. Marco and Rosa are pulled into a race to decide who, if anyone, should be allowed to wield it.

These are adventures rather than horror, but the tone is still quietly eerie. Rickman lets his young characters argue about belief, loyalty and responsibility while scrambling over the Tor, exploring churches and dodging adults who are not nearly as wise as they think. Readers who have met Glastonbury already in the adult novel The Chalice will recognise both locations and underlying questions, but the Marco books stand alone as lively, thoughtful stories.

For younger teens, they offer a way into Rickman’s blend of folklore, mystery and contemporary concerns. For older fans, they fill in another corner of the map, showing how the same landscape looks when you’re seeing it for the first time, from a bike rather than a car and with summer holidays at stake.