Borribles are runaway children whose ears become pointed as they take to the streets, indicators of their independence and intelligence.

As long as their ears remain unclipped they will never age; for this reason, they wear woollen hats pulled low over their ears in order to remain undetected by the authorities, who find their freedom threatening to the social order.

All this leads the Borribles deep in to Wendle territory beneath the streets of Wandsworth, and down in to a shifting tunnel of mud dug deep beneath the mudflats of the Wandle River.

David Langford reviewed The Borribles Go For Broke in the May 1984 issue of White Dwarf, stating: Sussworth and his minion Sergeant Hanks are brilliantly awful grotesques, like Dickens characters; with their ghastly dedication they'd burn any number of ideologically unsound books, especially this one.

Meanwhile the main story is about bloody internecine strife between Borribles, and amounts to a mini-epic.