Beagle had been involved in a long legal battle with his former manager (with charges including fraud, defamation and financial elder abuse). It turns out, there was a reason for all this. I treated myself to an anniversary book box, imported from the USA, thinking I would be getting a beautiful anniversary edition, but, instead, discovered the book was a print edition of the incomplete first draft. I could import it from the USA, but I was put off by the price. There were graphic novel editions, but that wasn’t what I was after. It wasn’t in print in the UK, hadn’t been since the 1980s. This proved more difficult than anticipated. As an adult I discovered it was based on a book, and made it my mission to try and find it and read it, as I had done with The Princess Bride. Even when bits of it scared me – I remember finding the butterfly section particularly sinister for some reason, and I can only attribute that to the musical scoring of that particular scene – I was enraptured. I re-bought it on DVD when VHS became obsolete. I watched it over and over again, I can quote along with it, sing the soundtrack. I was given the VHS of the film as a birthday present, and it was the first video I owned that was just mine, not one bought to share with my brother. I first encountered The Last Unicorn when I was a fairly small child.

Joined along the way by the bumbling magician Schmendrick and the indomitable Molly Grue, the unicorn learns all about the joys and sorrows of life and love before meeting her destiny in the castle of a despondent monarch–and confronting the creature that would drive her kind to extinction… So she ventured out from the safety of the enchanted forest on a quest for others of her kind. The unicorn lived in a lilac wood, and she lived all alone. See Also: The Last Unicorn: The Lost Journey

The last unicorn book peter s beagle