Ronan Coghlan

The tale of an amazing discovery which sets Gavin, his friend Caroline and his enterprising younger brother Thomas on an astonishing quest to find the Wand of Merlin.

The tale of an amazing discovery which sets Gavin, his friend Caroline and his enterprising younger brother Thomas on an astonishing quest to find the Wand of Merlin, so it cannot be used to open the interdimensional portal to release the horrible Demogorgon, who will wreak havoc on the world. This tale includes a ferocious animal which roams the countryside by night, an uncouth orphanage director, an imperilled vicar's wife, a secret mini-kingdom in the New Forest, a band of menacing goblins, an army of hideous crones, a man who keeps his mad wife locked in a cage, a next door neighbour with a gun and an attitude problem and the wizard Merlin himself, still alive but not altogether stable.

While examining various belief traditions across Europe and the United States, The Fairy Realm consults an assemblage of anecdotal evidence as to the existence of fairies and other creatures that appear in fairy tales - giants, ogres, trolls, mermaids, brownies, wildmen, kelpie, puca and other mythological beings. Ronan Coghlan, whose works include The Encyclopaedia of Arthurian Legends, Handbook of Fairies, Irish Myth and Legend and The Grail, examines an array of alleged fairy sightings in an endeavour to find where fairies fit into the modern scientific concepts of the universe. Unlike myriad books on ghosts and extraterrestrials, this book boldly tackles the possibility of fairy existence, and in doing so dares to approach all manner of sceptical argument.

A supplementary work to the author's original "Dictionary of Cryptozoology" (1994), giving additional and updated information on entries it contains, but above all listing a vast number of new mystery animals.