Children’s fantasy novel where a boy discovers a house in the wood sheltering otherworldly people

Question

In the late 1980s in the U.K., I read a children's or young adults fantasy story - just one book.

It starts with a young boy as the central character (I think it is set in U.K.). The boy is staying with or lives with his gran in a house/cottage near a wood.

I remember him mowing the lawn in the book and then walking to a nearby wood where he finds a big old house hidden in the wood. Inside the house I think a family of otherworldly people are hiding, who are getting sicker through the story.

They are sheltering there as there is some kind of monster or beast on their own home world that has been killing them. I think the beast might have been the kraken but that might just be my associations from other novels.

The boy somehow helps these people defeat the monster.

Answer 1

Could this be Nina Beachcroft's Beyond World's End? By a bizarre coincidence, I just started re-reading it yesterday... It features a boy, Chris, who lives in a small village with his Grandmother, having been orphaned at a young age. One summer's day a few people in the village notice strange lights, and Chris follows them through a wood into an otherworldly place, which shows off signs of devastation. He runs into some strange people with unhuman proportions, who compel him to return bringing a girl with him. When Chris (and Jane, a rich girl who is often riding her pony around the village) return they show them their daughter, who was been cruelly bound by the Kraken and in a kind of living death for a year, and ask the two children to help.