The Call and The Invasion are a wonderfully dark and fun duology of books from Irish author Peadar O’Guilin. The less said about the setup the better, I think, as it’s wildly original and worth getting immersed in, but just to say it concerns a school at war with the lands of fairy, in a setup somewhere between The Hunger Games and a magic school story. The students are being trained as survivalists, while the fairies have horrible, body-warping powers. There are various encounters with tiny people – and some people even shrink.

I’ve seen this duology marketed as Young Adult literature but found them to be perfectly adult in style, and as nasty as a lot of adult horror I’ve read. The setting pitches them as “younger” stories, though, as they follow teenage characters. As my look into giantess and shrinking literature obviously deals with adult themes and size-shifting from a perspective of adult interest; the content here is borderline, though it does often concern older teenagers and adults. That aside, I thoroughly enjoyed these books on their own merits, and found the size disparities to be a pleasant bonus, so I thought it worth highlighting the books anyway.

Shrinking People in The Grey Lands

One of the chief areas of size-shifting in these novels is that when fairies cross over into Ireland, as they continually shrink until they go back. This leads to a couple of instances where normal-sized characters chase increasingly small invaders, which are fun but result in fairly little interaction (in one case, I think, they try to catch a fairy with a pot).

There is one exception, where there’s a prolonged incident in Book 2, The Invasion, with a teenage girl afflicted to shrink by the lands of fairy and a mad older female scientist trying to study her. In the end, the scientist traps the girl in a jar to top her from shrinking – and keeps her there, because only by staying in the jar can she stay the same size. The last we see of her, the poor girl has no choice but to remain the scientist’s prisoner…

Tiny People in The Grey Lands

The other area of size-disparity in these books is seen when the students from Ireland travel to the fairylands, which are occasionally populated by tiny people. In The Call, there is a moment when a teenage girl is swarmed by fairies, and in her panic squashes a tiny person under her bare foot (described as her feeling a squelch as she stepped on something, which she reconsiders as “someone?”).

There’s more of this in the sequel, The Invasion, where the main character  (another fairly young teenage girl) spends longer in the fairy lands and captures a tiny person to help her. She grabs him and hurts him to encourage him along, and he’s with her for quite a time. If I recall correctly, she snaps one of his arms.

Be warned, these stores are horror and these certainly aren’t nice encounters (which is why I’m so fond of them!). The fairylands are grotesque and terrible, and there’s a lot of chilling content in these books. But the encounters are great fun, and I personally recommend the books overall for a highly imaginative, tense adventure.

For more examples like this, check out my master list of giant women in literature here!