The Edge Chronicles was my Harry Potter. The book that made the world seem so much more magical after having read it. A book that was filled with so much imagination and creativity and I have yet to find anything quite like it. My mother found the first book at a used book store when I was around eight and bought it for me. I had just graduated from those “reader” books to reading longer novels and found myself obsessed with fantasy books. My mother saw a translucent insect looking thing with visible internal organs on the cover and thought, “Ah! Tertiary.” (I assume she thought of my actual name and not the screen name that did not exist yet.)
The Edge Chronicles is set upon the eponymous Edge. An outcropping of land overlooking a seemingly endless void. The books were set in the various locales from the Deepwoods to the Floating City of Sanctaphrax. The knights rode upon orange froglike carnivores called Prowlgrins. Sentient species includes the telepathic Waifs and the translucent insectoid Spindlebugs. Each of these species interacted with the others in this complicated world. Moreover, these series take place over the course of hundreds of years. We see massive political upheavals, changes to the magic of the world, industrial revolutions and the events that we witnessed become myth and legend. Moreover, the series was illustrated, with gorgeously drawn illustrations of the various creatures and characters filling each page. It’s a world that’s so odd yet so cohesive, iterating upon itself from book to book.
It really blew my mind as a kid, and it frankly still continues to boggle me that something so wonderfully odd can exist. Perhaps I was too young to read stories about characters like the Toe Taker, a knight who posed as a guide to kill travellers and steal their toes, searching from the remnants of lightning after their treks through the Twilight Woods. It’s been years and years since I’ve read these books, yet every piece of the world remains burned in my brain. It continues to inspire me, and make everything around me seem more magical. Not because this world is like ours, but because it is so fundamentally foreign. If I can make things that are half as creative as The Edge Chronicles, I would consider myself accomplished.
It is a series of children’s books, but I do recommend that you at least check out some of the pictures. There’s something so vast and grand about the Edge and the abyss it overlooks. And it’s a vastness that no series has ever been able to match, in my mind.
