Yeah, Garner doesn't pull his punches on the negative side of the world much. His later stuff heads more into the mystic, but he still doesn't treat his protagonists well. I'm reading 'Strandloper' for the first time at the moment; it is one of these later works, and it is very much an adult book.

Interestingly, I think that some of Garner's work is a lot like later YA - he was kind of out of his time. 'The Owl Service' is definitely one of those. I'm about halfway through re-reading that, and it is so much more like the contemporary YA I read than I remember it being like juvenilia of the time.