Weird, strange, a little disconcerting. I first heard this book on cassette when I was eight or nine years old, and it unsettled me. I'm sure I was anticipating a friendly fantasy story, something on the spectrum between Narnia and Roald Dahl. A Box of Nothing isn't friendly - in fact, it goes out of its way to be a little abrasive. There are sequences here reminiscent of James and the Giant Peach, but only if that book was as an early '80s punk rock music video. Everything's a little harsh, a little scary, a little bit twisted out of shape. There are one or two hints that Dickinson means it to be darkly funny, but I took it - and I still think a lot of kids would take it - pretty literally.

James, the protagonist, is an innocent - he mostly spends the book being buffeted from one situation to another. Once he stumbles into an alternate world known as "the Dump," his only companion is something called the Burra. It refers to itself in the plural and tells James that "we" are the consciousness of the entire Dump. Yet James mostly communicates with the Burra through an avatar made up of broken toys' parts: a stuffed donkey's head, a toy Kermit the Frog's floppy green arm, a wooden doll's leg, and so on. The Burra is engaged in finding other willing "members" (pieces of conscious junk) around the Dump and evading destruction by an army of giant rats. The rats carry guns, and their undersized leader wears a giant hat on which to fit all his gold braid - there's some conscious satire here, of a fairly edgy kind for a kids' book in 1985.

There's a lot of concepts packed into a very slight 110 pages, and it's to Dickinson's credit that he manages to put them all across without it feeling wildly underwritten (unlike the previous book of his I've read, The Weathermonger). How, I'm not sure. I think, in truth, he glances off a lot of them too quickly, but having James and the Burra discuss them - and accept them - means the audience rolls with them, too. A Box of Nothing feels like it could have been an animated special (with a synthesized music score), hopping from visual set piece to visual set piece, and each of those would have been quite memorable even if they weren't particularly content-rich. One sequence, set in the rats' prison, evokes strong concentration camp imagery - but it's over within ten pages. The same sequence on a screen, however brief, would have seared itself into a generation of children's minds. I suppose the prose already did that same work on imaginative kids like me.

This is not to say the entire book is either bleak or terrifying. There are a couple of charming moments, such as the excellent establishing sequence where James buys his box of nothing in a shop. The ending, too, has a valedictory quality that "makes up for" quite a bit of the book's earlier tone - even if it doesn't make a great deal of sense. On the whole, though, it's a book of images and moments, and the majority of these veer hard into the uncanny.

I have just finished reading the book for the third time (first as an adult). I know both times I've come back to it I've been trying to put my finger on what bothered me in childhood. This is a book that hints at feeling huge, hints at being dark, hints at something truly acrid just under the surface. It isn't any of those things, not quite - but you can feel all of them, right at the back of your mind, pretty much constantly. Not being able to quite reach any of them is unsatisfying, but I think the implications are strong enough to keep a reader wanting to try. A Box of Nothing is about something, I'm sure - and one day, perhaps, it will reveal itself to me in full. ( )

Humanity is in a race for the meaning of the Universe. Their champions are all they've cast aside and a small boy. Their enemies have been with them since the beginning of time. ( )