More about invisibility and Hurrying People streaming past

One of the articles in the series inspired by Stella Gibbons's My American covers Amy's Lee's nightmare experience in the form of a horrible recurring dream in which she is invisible to the crowds of Hurrying People who stream past and ignore her no matter how hard she tries to attract their attention. She also has a few daytime experiences that trigger memories of her dream.

Amy Lee is not alone in sometimes feeling like a ghost in a world full of real people. 

A nightmare from Neverwhere

This is an extract from Neil Gaiman's wonderful urban fantasy story Neverwhere:

“As a child, Richard had had nightmares in which he simply wasn’t there, in which, no matter how much noise he made, no matter what he did, nobody ever noticed him at all. He began to feel like that now, as people pushed in front of him...”

This is uncannily similar to what Amy Lee experiences in My American.

Examples from real life 

It is not just fictional people who sometimes feel invisible.

The former friend who is featured in the story about the sultanas and the fox cub told me that she often had a sense of standing apart and invisible while crowds of people streamed past. Another friend who was involved in some of the other synchronicities in that article had similar experiences. 

Something about Michael de Larrabeiti’s Borribles

Just like Alan Garner’s Owl Service, Michael de Larrabeiti’s Borrible books are for me once read, never forgotten.

The Borrible books are urban fantasy; the Borrible people whose adventures they recount are something of a wainscot society. The three Borrible books, which were later published in one volume, are:

The Borribles (1976)
The Borribles Go for Broke (1981)
Across the Dark Metropolis (1986).

There are no metaphysical elements in these books and they don’t contain much material that is relevant to this blog, but they do inspire some commentary.

The Borrible books are intended for older children but have a much wider appeal. Although I discovered them only as an adult, I found them fascinating; they left an immediate and permanent impression on the first reading. A big attraction for me is that they are set in London; they mention many places and features that I know well.

The Borrible books are a very good read, but they should have a warning for the faint-hearted and squeamish! They contain some vile, cruel, dangerous and sinister characters, there is much violence and killing, and some of the action takes place in very filthy and squalid surroundings such as sewers and junkyards.

In addition to that, they are sometimes seen as subversive. Across the Dark Metropolis, the third book in the series, was originally scheduled to be released in 1985, but the publishers pulled out at the last moment because of the riots in London. They felt that its strong anti-police message and glamourising of lawlessness made it unsuitable for publication in the climate of the time. By coincidence, some of the riots took place in areas of London that are mentioned in the book, Brixton for example.

What are Borribles?
Borribles are feral runaway children who never grow into adults - so long as they remain at liberty and their pointed ears remain unclipped. Some of them are around one hundred years old, but they still look like children.