Merlin's Wood

Robert Holdstock
Harper Collins

Martin and Rebecca return to the outskirts of Brocéliande, an enchanted forest in Brittany where they grew up as children approximately 15 years earlier. They have returned for the funeral of their mother. Despite being warned to leave by family and local friends, they stay to settle the estate and take up residence in their childhood home.

The first two books of Holdstock's 'Ryhope Wood' cycle were a real revelation to me so I've been keeping an eye out for the other parts of the series.  'Merlin's Wood' is the fifth book in the series and takes the story out of England and into France.

We know from the first book that other magical woods exist in other countries and so here we find ourselves in the French equivalent, 'Broceliande', the resting place of Merlin.  In the outskirts of the Wood the children of the town have long danced in the ghosts fleeing the wood but for Martin and Rebecca their return to the area brings only heartbreak when their son, born deaf, dumb and blind, begins to slowly suck the life out of his mother as he's consumed by another spirit within the Wood.

This one isn't nearly as successful as the other two.  It gets off to a very slow and uninspiring start and despite improving as the story progresses it never seems to quite find it's rhythm.  It's a shame as the whole songs and ghosts ideas were really strong but Holdstock just didn't seem to get a firm grip on either his idea or of its telling.  Holdstock is generally eminently readable and this one is no different but it never really comes close to hitting the heights of the first two.

Buy it here - Merlin's Wood (Mythago Wood Book 5)

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Ice

Anna Kavan
Penguin Modern Classics

No one knows why the ice has come, and no one can stop it. Every day it creeps further across the earth, covering the land in snow and freezing everything in its path. Through this bleached, devastated world, one man pursues the sylph-like, silver-haired girl he loves, as she keeps running - away from her husband; away from the sinister 'warden' who seeks to control her; away from him.
 It was the cover image by Jim Stoddart that caught my eye and the possibility of a post-apocalypse novel that clinched the deal but what I got was something very different.

Anna Kavan was an English writer and painter born, Helen Emily Woods and first published under her married name of Helen Ferguson, she adopted the name of a character from one of her stories as her legal name in 1939 shortly after her divorce from her second husband.

Kavan started using heroin in the mid 1920s having been introduced to it by either racing drivers on the French Riviera or by her tennis coach, reports vary.  It was an addiction that was to follow her throughout her life to the extent that, according to reports, when heroin was prohibited in the UK she stockpiled so much that at the time of her death in 1968 her flat in London's Notting Hill contained "enough heroin to kill the whole street'

'Ice' was written a year before her death and is a Burroughsian fever dream of broken perspectives and Kafka-esque monolithic impenetrability. Now regarded as a 'slipstream' novel - one that falls between the cracks of the various genres - it is notionally sci-fi in its post-apocalyptic setting as a sheet of ice moves inexorably to cover the Earth but Kavan's tale of helplessness, brutality, rejection and loss is very far from most tales that characterise the genre.

Our narrator spends the book chasing after, occasionally catching, occasionally losing the young, fragile albino woman he claims to love, seeking to rescue her from the brutal 'warden' who keeps her cowed, but who is often just as violent and domineering in his ways.

Such are the novel's vagaries, full of jarring perspective shifts and hallucinations, that it remains open to interpretation.  That it is a meditation on the role of women seems self evident but alongside this I felt like I was being offered an insight into the authors internal world as the various aspects of Kavan's psyche play out in one long heroin addiction metaphor.

On a straight forward readability level this isn't a novel to pick up - as I did - for a quick read and indeed I found much of it to be a bit of a chore but equally that's not something I'm necessarily put off by and in the final analysis it was beautifully written and showed an imagination free and unfettered by common constraints.

Buy it here - UK  /  US
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The Great God Pan and Other Horror Stories

Arthur Machen
Oxford University Press

Something pushed out from the body there on the floor, and stretched forth a slimy, wavering tentacle... 
Perhaps no figure better embodies the transition from the Gothic tradition to modern horror than Arthur Machen. In the final decade of the nineteenth century, the Welsh writer produced a seminal body of tales of occult horror, spiritual and physical corruption, and malignant survivals from the primeval past which horrified and scandalised-late-Victorian readers. Machen's "weird fiction" has influenced generations of storytellers, from H. P. Lovecraft to Guillermo Del Toro-and it remains no less unsettling today.
This new collection, which includes the complete novel The Three Impostors as well as such celebrated tales as The Great God Pan and The White People, constitutes the most comprehensive critical edition of Machen yet to appear. In addition to the core late-Victorian horror classics, a selection of lesser-known prose poems and later tales helps to present a fuller picture of the development of Machen's weird vision. The edition's introduction and notes contextualise the life and work of this foundational figure in the history of horror.

When Arthur Machen died in 1947 he left behind a body of work that has proved to be amongst the most quietly influential writings in the fields of strange fiction.  Various authors, film-makers, musicians and the society that bears his name have all promoted and been inspired by his work and as such collections are often to be found.  Now, I'm of the mind that all Machen collections are good Machen collections but occasionally a real gem appears as is the case here.

Produced as part of the Oxford World's Classics series and dressed in a cover illustration of Pan dating from 1895 - the year after Machen published the title story here - by William H Bradley, the doyen of American Art Nouveau illustrators, editor Aaron Worth has compiled an eye wateringly wonderful assortment of gems taken from every era of Machen's career.

There are of course certain stories that one can guarantee will be present in any collection, the title piece, 'The Shining Pyramid', 'The White People' & 'The Bowmen' but rather than just giving us the two more famous parts of 'The Three Impostors' - 'The Novel of the Black Seal' & 'The Novel of the White Powder' - he has, rather wonderfully, included the entire novel.  Alongside these undoubted gems we find later gold such as Machen's thin place story 'N', the simple kindness of 'Tree of Life', the hidden pagan rites of 'The Ceremony', and the alchemical experiments of 'The Inmost Light' amongst many others.

As a collection it works on both levels required of such a book, it provides a wide ranging overview of the authors work featuring both the more feted and the less read tales but equally for those with a more established love of the work it is simply a well selected overview that will allow you to revisit old favourites and passing acquaintances.

Buy it here - UK  /  US
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The Lark Ascending: People, Music and Landscape in Twentieth-Century Britain

Richard King
Faber & Faber

Over the course of the twentieth century, The Lark Ascending by Ralph Vaughan Williams is the piece of music that has come to define the mythical concept of the English countryside, with its babbling brooks and skylarks. Yet, the landscape is not really an unaffected utopia, but a living, working and occasionally rancorous environment that has forged a nation's musical personality. On a journey that takes us from post-war poets and artists to the free party scene embraced by the acid house and travelling communities, Richard King explores how Britain's history and identity have been shaped by the mysterious relationship between music and nature.

Taking as its starting point Ralph Vaughan Williams' 1920 composition from which the book takes its name King has undertaken an exploration of the changing face of the British countryside through the 20th century and of the individuals and musicians that have been inspired by it.

Taking a sedate journey across the century we are introduced to a wide variety of both the savoury and unsavoury characters who have found solace and identity in nature; from those escaping the horrors of the battlefields of WWI to the blood and country ugly politics of the inter war years which mixed communing with nature with a nationalist ideology and folk music / dance that still pollutes much of the outside edges of folk music and on to 'back to basics' pioneers like John Seymour who's West Wales small holding along with the books and programmes he made through the 60s and 70s championed the cause into a movement so parodied in shows like 'The Good Life'.  Beyond this King provides a keen, if brief, overview into pivotal events such as the Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp, the Peace Convoy, the free festivals and the early rave scene and of the various legislations introduced to curtail all these activities.

Musically we travel from Vaughan Williams via Cecil Sharp and the various folk archivists through the acid folk generation chronicled in Rob Young's fabulous 'Electric Eden' (UK / US). Further on we skirt around Hawkwind and The Penguin Cafe Orchestra and composer Gavin Bryars before settling on the hauntologically lysergic sounds of Boards of Canada whose music often feels like an oneiric time capsule of days gone bye.

It's a fascinating read.  Personally I'd have liked to hear much more of the voices of the actual musicians and their views on how the landscape had influenced their work but in their absence King provides a coolly authorial analysis.  Unusually for what is a fairly short book King takes a rambling approach and makes a number of leaps of logic - those who raised an eyebrow at the mention of Penguin Cafe back there in a book about the links between music and landscape I can assure you I did the same - and the finished article is too idiosyncratic to provide the definitive word on the topic but this is a subject I hold dear and one that fuels my own music so I eagerly devoured the book and generally wasn't disappointed with what proved to be a timely and interesting read.

Buy it here - UK  / US

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Weep Not My Wanton: Selected Short Stories

A.E. Coppard
Turnpike Books

A.E. Coppards short stories capture a sensual rural England combining poetic description of its landscape with characters tied to a more elemental life, who experience passions of love, loss and regret. Drawing on traditional folklore and ballads, at a time when the countryside s traditional culture was dying out, Coppards stories have a uniquely melancholic tone, an understanding of human nature and the secret desires of women with an individual vision of England.

Until a month or so ago I'd never heard of Coppard and then along came Mark Valentine's newest collection essays extolling the quiet joys of those authors who have fallen by the wayside and those never quite found the path in the first place.  There was much in the book that intrigued but none more so than A.E. Coppard.  Mark's description was just so enticing that I put in a quick order for the only currently available collection of Coppard's work.

Coppard was apparently much admired by, amongst others, Algernon Blackwood and the stories in this collection show they shared an imagination defined by landscape but for Coppard this is governed by an arcadian vision of life.  His stories tell of a deep understanding of the quirks and foibles of humanity and celebrate their interactions and their comunications without ever feeling the need to judge or moralise.  They are elegantly formed and display a real mastery of the short story form.

On the whole I must admit to not being as entirely smitten with the book as I'd hoped to be.  The stories are beautifully written and enjoyable enough but the ones featured here aren't really entirely to my taste being for the most part bereft of the oddities I look for in a book. I know though that he had a bit of a penchant for the strange and the one truly weird tale here, 'Adam and Eve and Pinch Me', with its wandering spirit along with the strength of his writing has me positively craving for a copy of a collection of his stranger stories.

Buy it here - Weep Not My Wanton: Selected Short Stories

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A Wild Tumultory Library

Mark Valentine
Tartarus Press

Read about the most dangerous man in the West; the poem written by a stuffed crocodile; the alchemist called the great-nephew to the Queen of Faerie; aesthetes, dandies, visionaries, anti­quaries, fortune tellers and fakirs, forgotten writers and much more.
Mark Valentine’s third collection of essays explores the curious byways of literature and lore in a similar manner to his earlier volumes Haunted by Books and A Country Still All Mystery.
Taking its title from an encounter in Thomas De Quincey’s youthful wanderings, Valentine’s writing shares that author’s delight in the arcane, the recondite and the obscure.

Mark's previous volume of essays 'A Country Still All Mystery' was one of the finest things I read in all of 2017.  In its pages he introduced us to authors such as Mary Butts and Randolph Stow alongside articles on more established names such as William Hope Hodgson, Lord Dunsany, Sarban and the inevitable Arthur Machen.  This third collection (there was a first called 'Haunted by Books' which I've yet to track down) continues in the noble bookman tradition of exposing the lives and works of little known authors to us all and 'A Wild Tumultory Library' is crammed with writers that with few exceptions - Elizabeth Bowen, L.P. Hartley, M.R. James, Oscar Wilde & Dylan Thomas - were entirely new to me.

Even when there seems little chance of ever finding the elusive authors for your own library there's much to enjoy here.  Mark is a delightful wordsmith and as such always a joy to read, the lives and ideas of his subjects make for engaging topics and you're always going to find at least one author that you're going to absolutely need to track something down by whether it be books by John Davidson, P.M. Hubbard, Richard Oke, E.V. Jones or, for me in particular, A.E. Coppard along with a couple of other possibles that I've jotted into my notebook.

Mark is a bibliophile par excellence but happily for us all is one for whom the joy in collecting is enhanced in the sharing of his finds and the revivification of those he enjoys and I for one thank him for it - my bank account less so but I'd rather listen to Mark than to him.

Buy it here - A Wild Tumultory Library

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Wakenhyrst

Michelle Paver
Head of Zeus

1906: A large manor house, Wake's End, sits on the edge of a bleak Fen, just outside the town of Wakenhyrst. It is the home of Edmund Stearn and his family – a historian, scholar and land-owner, he's an upstanding member of the local community. But all is not well at Wake's End. Edmund dominates his family tyrannically, in particular daughter Maud. When Maud's mother dies in childbirth and she's left alone with her strict, disciplinarian father, Maud's isolation drives her to her father's study, where she happens upon his diary.

In a lonely house on the Suffolk Fens live Maud and her repressive, domineering and arrogant father, Edmund.  Upon the death of her mother Maud is left bereft of compassionate company and learns to both fend for herself and to exact sweet revenge on the man who she blames for her beloved mother death.  Into the mix is thrown her father's discovery of a, as he sees it, malevolent mediaeval painting in the local church that exacerbates his slide into madness and murder.

Paver has managed that most tricky of literary feats and written a supernatural novel that maintains it's aura of eerie menace and it's ambiguity throughout.  The gothic menace of the desolate house and the forbidding fens with its buried secrets and it's hidden depths loom over the story and contribute to Edmund's inexorable slide into insanity. Maud is gloriously malicious and uncompromisingly resolute in her revenge whilst never losing our sympathy, such is the callousness of her upbringing, yet we are left wondering if it is only Maud who is conspiring against Edmund or if he is correct and there are supernatural forces ranged against him.

With a successful YA series and several other novels with a supernatural bent behind her Paver has honed her storytelling and her lively prose and rock solid storytelling kept me hooked throughout and left an impression that has lasted long after I closed the final page.

Buy it here - Wakenhyrst

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The Tree

John Fowles
Vintage

In this series of moving recollections involving both his childhood and his work as a mature artist, John Fowles explains the impact of nature on his life and the dangers inherent in our traditional urge to categorise, to tame and ultimately to possess the landscape. This acquisitive drive leads to alienation and an antagonism to the apparent disorder and randomness of the natural world.
For John Fowles the tree is the best analogue of prose fiction, symbolising the wild side of our psyche, and he stresses the importance in art of the unpredictable, the unaccountable and the intuitive.
This fascinating text gives a unique insight into the author and offers the key to a true understanding of the inspiration for his work. 

The other month when I was waxing lyrical to anyone who'd stand still long enough about Mythago Wood various people took to recommending books to me about trees.  Of them all the one that caught my attention was John ('French Lieutenant's Woman') Fowles' 'The Tree', an examination and a meditation on the relationship between nature and creativity.

At the offset we can see the book as a memoir as Fowles relates his father's predilection for exerting rigid control over his prized fruit trees fully embracing the Victorian ethos of categorisation and control.  Exacting an obsessive level of toil out of both himself, the plants and the literal fruits of his labours.

For Fowles the younger though it was a war time evacuation to Devon that finally affirmed his own relationship with nature which for him came to be characterised by "space, wildness, woods" and, as he roamed, by the pleasures of discovery.  It's to this that he attributes is own chaotic creativity.  In the very 'treeness' of a tree he finds his definition of creativity that like nature it is unquantifiable and indescribable and the true nature of both can be found by casting off the chains of "usefulness" and - to use an en vogue phrase - rewilding.

At its end Fowles relates a visit to the ancient forest of Wistman's Wood on Dartmoor where, in the embrace of the oaks, he finds a true connection and a loss of distinction between himself and what we have come to other as the 'natural world'.

I found this book not only a revelation but also an affirmation.  I share Fowles' understanding and love of the chaotic in nature although I will admit to a guilty pleasure in mythologising of, particularly, the older and wilder green places.  For me nature is at it's truest when left free of human interference.  For instance when I first visited Glastonbury town I was assailed by endless evocations of "the calm", "the peace", "the tranquillity" and "the spirituality" of Chalice Well Gardens but when I got there I discovered essentially a formal garden, nature trapped and pruned, all very pretty but caged inside pathways and borders; an English country garden with pixie statues and crystals.  It seemed to me the very antithesis of the natural that I found in parts of the mountains surrounding the Welsh valley where I grew up, along the coast on which I now live and also in the anarchic sprawl that I, like Fowles before me, actively - or perhaps more accurately, passively - encourage my garden to exist in.

Like Fowles, for me freedom lies in an escape from the restrictions of limitations and categories and his passionate embrace of the chaotic as the truly natural is an idea I feel very much at home in.

Buy it here - The Tree

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The Delirium Brief

Charles Stross
Orbit

Someone is dead set to air the spy agency’s dirty laundry in The Delirium Brief, the next installment to Charles Stross’ Hugo Award-winning comedic dark fantasy Laundry Files series!
Bob Howard’s career in the Laundry, the secret British government agency dedicated to protecting the world from unspeakable horrors from beyond spacetime, has entailed high combat, brilliant hacking, ancient magic, and combat with indescribably repellent creatures of pure evil. It has also involved a wearying amount of paperwork and office politics, and his expense reports are still a mess.

Now, following the invasion of Yorkshire by the Host of Air and Darkness, the Laundry’s existence has become public, and Bob is being trotted out on TV to answer pointed questions about elven asylum seekers. What neither Bob nor his managers have foreseen is that their organization has earned the attention of a horror far more terrifying than any demon: a British government looking for public services to privatize.

Inch by inch, Bob Howard and his managers are forced to consider the truly unthinkable: a coup against the British government itself.

With this, the 8th of Stross' Lovecraftian spy series 'The Laundry Files' we get to view the fallout of the previous volumes invasion of the Elves alongside a sudden devastating attack on the very agency itself from foes both new and old.  Bob Howard is back at the centre of things after being awol last time round in favour of one of the 'phangs' and it's good to have him back as things are a lot more personable with the Eater of Souls as our narrator.

I'm not entirely on board - yet - with the current developments in the storyline. Stross almost lost me entirely with the superhero story and the elf bothering of the last wasn't entirely to my taste and everything has gotten a little too overt and blockbustery.  The books felt like they were on a more stale footing when it was all more clandestine in nature but I'm splitting hairs.  This is another really fun read in an often excellent series and even those books I was just whingeing about were a riot.  The fallout from this story and it's predecessor will no doubt be at the core of the books to come and it'll be fascinating and fun to watch all the health and safety violations that will make life a little too interesting for Bob and his colleagues.

Buy it here - The Delirium Brief: A Laundry Files Novel

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Ghostland: In Search of a Haunted Country

Edward Parnell
William Collins

In his late thirties, Edward Parnell found himself trapped in the recurring nightmare of a family tragedy. For comfort, he turned to his bookshelves, back to the ghost stories that obsessed him as a boy, and to the writers through the ages who have attempted to confront what comes after death.
In Ghostland, Parnell goes in search of the ‘sequestered places’ of the British Isles, our lonely moors, our moss-covered cemeteries, our stark shores and our folkloric woodlands. He explores how these landscapes conjured and shaped a kaleidoscopic spectrum of literature and cinema, from the ghost stories and weird fiction of M.R. James, Arthur Machen and Algernon Blackwood to the children’s fantasy novels of Alan Garner and Susan Cooper; from W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn and Graham Swift’s Waterland to the archetypal ‘folk horror’ film The Wicker Man… Ghostland is Parnell’s moving exploration of what has haunted our writers and artists – and what is haunting him. It is a unique and elegiac meditation on grief, memory and longing, and of the redemptive power of stories and nature.

Parnell's 'Ghostland' is a Britain of dark and lonely water, of gothic churches standing sentinel over tumble down graveyards where a solitary crow caws a lament to the dead, it's one of ancient woodland's that are home to nature deities driven by mischievous natures and windswept coastlines beneath which whole civilisations have disappeared.  Essentially it's exactly the same as mine.

His book is an exploration of this haunted old country of ours exploring it's by-ways as a way of understanding the inspiration it has been for writers of the numinous such as Arthur Machen, MR James, William Hope Hodgson, Susan Cooper and Alan Garner amongst others.  Truthfully, for devotees of those authors there may be little new to learn but for each he teases out a nugget or two and for all he introduces and explores in an always entertaining style.

Alongside this he tells his own story and of the relationships and experiences that have accompanied his reading of those authors and which have shaped his life.  Straddling the line between nature writing and memoir this was for me the least effective aspect, not because it was poorly written or anything of the sort but simply because neither are literary endeavours that hold my attention for long; I've more interest in being amongst nature than reading about it and autobiographical texts tend to make me feel unpleasantly voyeuristic.

As a whole though Parnell has produced an engaging and thoroughly enjoyable exploration of the literary fascination that lies at the heart of this mouldy old run down land that will appeal to weird fiction neophytes and acolytes alike.

Buy it here -  UK  / US

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Pale Illuminations

Mark Valentine,
Reggie Oliver
Peter Bell
Derek John
Sarob Press

Sarob Press is delighted to announce the publication of “THE PALE ILLUMINATIONS” ~ four all new darkly supernatural stories and novellas (each imbued with a sense of the mystery and the legends of landscape and place) by PETER BELL, MARK VALENTINE, REGGIE OLIVER and DEREK JOHN.
“Labyrinth” by Peter Bell ... set mostly in the 1960s this is a story of ancient well worship in the Peak District, and the cult of Proserpina in Roman Britain.
“A Chess Game at Michaelmas” by Mark Valentine ... a tale set in south-west England, and of strange customs and age-old ritual, a secret game, and a dark shadowy visitor.
“The Old Man of the Woods” by Reggie Oliver ... a new home in rural France, legends of the misty past, and a weird haunting story of the dark and deeply sinister woods.
“Cropmarks” by Derek John ... an Irish setting for a modern tale of witchcraft, dark ceremonies, a centuries-old place of worship, strange discoveries and a malevolent curse.

 I had the pleasure to read a previous Sarob collection a few years back and so was very happy to grab a copy of this new collection.  Inside we have four tales, two by authors who have featured in these pages before - Mark Valentine & Reggie Oliver - and two who are respectively new and newish to me - Peter Bell & Derek John.  Three of the stories I enjoyed very much indeed but one I found to be less to my taste and it's that one with which I'll start.

Derek John's 'Cropmarks' has at its heart a story that weaves communal life, neighbourly conflict and new age witchery into a tale that feels far too soap opera to satisfy me.  On the flipside though we have a trio of very fine stories beginning with Peter Bell's 'Labyrinth' a storythat tells of a student researcher investigating the remains of a 'forgotten' cult of Prosperina, the Roman Goddess of fertility, wine and agriculture.  Into a landscape drenched with the detritus of myth and folklore.  It's an absorbing tale that I could have lingered with longer and would have enjoyed watching Bell tease more out of his supporting cast of locals and yokels, particularly the stranger ones.

Reggie Oliver's 'The Old Man of the Woods' is a gentle story of a farmhouse haunted by loss and of the shadows we leave behind. As with the other stories of his that I've read - which admittedly isn't as many as I'd like - this is a delicate tale that unfolds around you and gently insinuates itself into your affections via the chills it sends up your spine.

Which leaves us with Mark Valentine's 'A Chess Game At Michelmas', one of Mark's signature strange little Machenesque / Dunsanyish / Blackwoody tales of neglected rituals and rural faery tale.  It is, of course, a wonderful read and Mark is, for me, alongside the creme of the weird fiction writers - I chose those names back there deliberately.  His writing is perfectly measured and I want to live in the worlds of his imagination and whilst I don't suppose that would be the most comfortable, or indeed safest, of existences what a time you'd have.

I've a couple of these Sarob Press collections now and they've been most excellent and whilst I'm pretty sure this lovely and very limited book is now sold out this is a publisher who deserves to be on the radar of everyone with a love of strange tales.

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Doorway to Dilemma: Bewildering Tales of Dark Fantasy

Mike Ashley (ed)
British Library

“The events which I purpose detailing are of so extraordinary a character that I am quite prepared to meet with an unusual amount of incredulity and scorn…”
Welcome to the realm of Dark Fantasy, where the weird prevails and accounts of unanswerable dilemma find their home. Gathered within these pages are twisted yarns, encounters with logic-defying creatures and nightmarish fables certain to perplex and beguile.
So join us as we journey across the threshold, deep into the Library’s vaults where nineteen deliciously dark and totally dumbfounding stories await. These tales, plucked from long-lost literary magazines and anthologies spring to life again to embody this most mesmerising of genres.

 First things first, I'm going to say up front that I really hate the term 'Dark Fantasy'.  In the introduction here Ashley gives a brief rundown of the history of the term but I'm sorry but to me it just sounds like a euphemism for S&M porn of the various shades of grey variety.

Lord Dunsany

Beyond the dubious title what we have is a bit of an uninspiring collection of tales that fails to excite.  There are some fine tales in amongst and indeed one actual classic in Arthur Machen's 'The White People' but there are a couple of absolute stinkers too (that I'm not going to name).

Of those authors I know I must admit to being less than besotted with Lord Dunsany as most of what I've read has been a little too fabley for my tastes (I am open to recommendations that'll change my mind) and the H.G Wells tale here is very much of the same ilk.  I was though much taken by 'Fear' written by Wells' wife Catherine and Lucy Clifford's 'The New Mother' was a bit of fun even if again it fell into that pesky fable category.

Of the others I found very little of interest and it was all a bit of a slog that I had to intersperse with more engaging books in order to even finish it.  If however you have a more deeply developed love of a fable or a folktale then you may find more to love here, I wish I had because I've thoroughly enjoyed the others in this series and was looking forward to this one.

Buy it here - Doorway to Dilemma

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Lavondyss

Robert Holdstock
Orion Books

At the heart of the wildwood lies a place of mystery and legend, from which few return and none emerged unchanged: Lavondyss . . . the ultimate realm, the source of all myth.
When Harry Keeton disappeared into Ryhope Wood, his sister Tallis was just an infant. Now, thirteen years old, she hears him whispering to her from the Otherworld. He is in danger. He needs her help. Using masks, magic and clues left by her grandfather, she finds a way to enter the primitive forest and begin her search. Eventually she comes to Lavondyss itself, a realm both beautiful and deadly, a place in which she is changed forever.

Following on from the glorious 'Mythago Wood' the second book in the Ryhope Wood cycle takes a slightly different tack to it's predecessor.

Beginning shortly after the departure, in book one, of Harry Keeton into the depths of Ryhope Wood we here have the story of his little sister 'Tallis' and her quest to find and help him escape from it's confines.  In this she is aided by both the masks and the mythagos she creates along the way in a story that spans her entire life.

This time out Holdstock seems more interested in the role of place and landscape in myth and legend than he does in those that populate it.  Many of the characters and places are crude and at times bestial and here magic is at it's most primal, found literally within their bones, their twigs and their stones.

Life in the wood, as befits a realm made from the mythic collective unconscious of a nation, is tumultuous and brutish but in Tallis we have a guide whose understanding of the realm is instinctive having lived her entire life in it's shadow and it's very substance.

As a sequel Lavondyss is an odd sort of creation that takes two points from it's forebear and weaves them into it's narrative but I think considering it as a sequel does it an injustice. Lavondyss is a book almost entirely unto itself that tells a different sort of story and does so in a manner that is every bit as awe-inspiring as it's - let's call it a - companion volume.

But it here - Lavondyss

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Lanny

Max Porter
Faber

There’s a village sixty miles outside London. It’s no different from many other villages in England: one pub, one church, red-brick cottages, council cottages and a few bigger houses dotted about. Voices rise up, as they might do anywhere, speaking of loving and needing and working and dying and walking the dogs.
This village belongs to the people who live in it and to the people who lived in it hundreds of years ago. It belongs to England’s mysterious past and its confounding present. But it also belongs to Dead Papa Toothwort, a figure schoolchildren used to draw green and leafy, choked by tendrils growing out of his mouth. 
Dead Papa Toothwort is awake. He is listening to this twenty-first-century village, to his English symphony. He is listening, intently, for a mischievous, enchanting boy whose parents have recently made the village their home. Lanny.

Max Porter hit big the other year with his debut novel, 'Grief is a Thing With Feathers' a poetical meditation on loss with an absolutely devastating finale.  For his second novel loss - of a different sort - also takes centre stage wrapped up in a tale of a young boy and his love of his home, peripherally of Dead Papa Toothwort the genius loci of that place and crucially, as with the previous book, how loss and grief is dealt with by those left behind; an exploration writ large in the a middle section formed from an almost stream of consciousness bite sized narrative plucked from the thoughts and conversations of the various villagers.

Very much a book of three parts with Porter employing three different devices to tell his tale.  The opening section uses the same format as his previous novel giving each character a monologue or vignette from which we can build the story, the second is the whirling schizophrenic cut-ups whilst the third is a more traditional story form albeit one that is largely based in illusion as Dead Papa Toothwort takes the role of game show host.  I enjoyed the perspective shifts enormously although I will say if you are familiar with Porter's debut then the first section is a recognisable, and possibly over-familiar, tool.

The book as a whole is a shining experience. Transformative, playful and desperately serious.  It's consistently readable even when flipping it's structure on it's head and holds it's more esoteric elements in just enough abeyance to make you wonder at their legitimacy whilst being entirely certain of their impact.

Buy it here - UK / US

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Lies Sleeping

Ben Aaronovitch
Gollancz

Join Peter Grant, detective and apprentice wizard, for a brand new case . . .
Martin Chorley, aka the Faceless Man, wanted for multiple counts of murder, fraud, and crimes against humanity, has been unmasked and is on the run. Peter Grant, Detective Constable and apprentice wizard, now plays a key role in an unprecedented joint operation to bring Chorley to justice.
But even as the unwieldy might of the Metropolitan Police bears down on its foe, Peter uncovers clues that Chorley, far from being finished, is executing the final stages of a long term plan. A plan that has its roots in London’s two thousand bloody years of history, and could literally bring the city to its knees.
To save his beloved city Peter’s going to need help from his former best friend and colleague–Lesley May–who brutally betrayed him and everything he thought she believed in. And, far worse, he might even have to come to terms with the malevolent supernatural killer and agent of chaos known as Mr Punch. 

 Last time out we finally got to know the identity of the Faceless Man as the web of deceit he had woven around his true identity came crashing down in the most brutal way. Now he's on the run and the residents of The Folly and the rest of the forces of the Fuzz are hot on his trail.

Along the way Peter gets to spend some time with the Thames clan, the Folly gets some unexpected new recruits and there's an unexpected, and rather lovely, reunion before everything that's been building over the rest of the series comes rushing to a head.

Now, I really hope there's more here than we've seen so far as as a climax to a 7 novel (plus assorted comics and novellas) it's a tad underwhelming.  It's lively and readable and filled with warmth and humour as is always the case with Aaronovitch but just a tad anticlimactic.  Hopefully though he has something up his sleeve and as ever I'm eagerly awaiting the next instalment.

Buy it here - Lies Sleeping

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Uncanny Stories

May Sinclair
Wordsworth Editions

May Sinclair was an innovator of modern fiction, a late Victorian who was also a precursor to Virginia Woolf. In her Uncanny Stories (1923), Sinclair combines the traditional ghost story with the discoveries of Freud and Einstein. The stories shock, enthral, delight and unsettle.
Two lovers are doomed to repeat their empty affair for the rest of eternity... A female telepath is forced to face the consequences of her actions... The victim of a violent murder has the last laugh on his assailant... An amateur philosopher discovers that there is more to Heaven than meets the eye.
Specially included in this volume is The Intercessor (1911), Sinclair's powerful story of childhood and abandoned love, a tale whose intensity compares with that of the Brontës.

 I first came across May Sinclair a few months back in the 'Mortal Echoes' anthology from The British Library which featured her story 'Where Their Fire Is Not Quenched' a truly terrifying tales of a very personal Hell.  Not long after that I watched the TV adaptation of her 'Intercessor' which was a rather beautiful ghost story about loss, blame and guilt.  I was already hooked after the former and by the end of the second I was besotted.  As it happened sat unread on a shelf here I had this collection of her work so I happily waded in.

Following what seems to have been a fairly difficult childhood and a problematic relationship[ with her mother, Sinclair took to writing to support them at a time when she was also becoming an active supporter of the women's suffrage movement.  All these factors have a presence in her stories where independent and sexually liberated women find themselves at the mercy of oppressive control either from family, tradition or religion.

Those two previously mentioned stories bookend this collection and do so in a manner that shows the extremes of her tales; the cruel, inescapable brutality of the former and the poignant delicacy of the latter joined by the quality of the prose.

Between the two reside various shades of fear with the standout moment being the psychic shenanigans of 'The Flaw in the Crystal' that, with it's lead character of a confident and sexually liberated young woman is a real breath of fresh air although that's not to belittle any of the remaining five stories.  Admittedly some, like 'The Token' are a little slight but they don't hang around and make for nifty quick reads between the more developed tales.

Sinclair's supernatural output was small but substantial and it's a shame that she isn't better regarded as stories like 'Where Their Fire Is Not Quenched' have a timeless quality that still resonates.

Buy it here - Uncanny Stories (Wordsworth Mystery & Supernatural) (Tales of Mystery & the Supernatural)

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Keyhole

Matthew G. Rees
Three Impostors

Several writers, Arthur Machen among them, have spoken of their certainty of our co-existence with another world – one that we are close to in our daily lives and from which we are separated by the finest partition; a place of ancient forces and wisdom, and darker, more peculiar things.

'Three Impostors is a publisher based out of Newport, South Wales that takes it's name from the work of Arthur Machen - born and raised in the nearby town of Caerleon - and which has at it's heart a desire to further explore those fertile lands that the master so beautifully chronicled.

Rees' debut collection offers us keyhole peeps into an other land, an other Wales in actuality which is the cause of my only complaint with what is an otherwise excellent collection as it does lend a slightly parochial feel to the proceedings that raises the spectre of the type of worthy Welsh literature that was inflicted on some of us unlucky souls in our schooling.  Such feelings are fleeting though as what raises 'Keyholes' is Rees' lively prose and an imagination as bright and colourful as the kingfishers that swarm around the head of the young lady of the books' title piece.

Within the covers of the book Rees takes us to places where pensioners wager their teeth, where the spirits of soldiers stalk the hills, where men float through and away from life, where revenge, comeuppance, grief and humour are all in evidence and where the pub is the ultimate refuge.

This is a hugely recommended collection that marks Rees out as a writer capable of spinning tales of vibrant imagination and who is unafraid to peer into stranger places.

Available from the publisher at the link above (tell them Wyrd Britain sent you)

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Other Edens

Christopher Evans (ed)
Robert Holdstock (ed)
Unwin

This 1987 collection of sci fi and fantasy shorts was produced to address a perceived gap in the availability of a mass market anthology collection at the time.  A hark back to the myriad of books of shorts that covered book shelves of the 1970s.  It went on to spawn two sequels over the next two years.  This first one boasting a line up entirely consisting of UK based - not necessarily British - authors proved to be an enjoyable if slightly inconsistent read.

The standout story here is Robert Holdstock's 'Scarrowfell'. Having just emerged from his 'Mythago Wood' I was enthused to read more and it certainly delivered with another piece of pagan Celtic fantasy that felt both uncontrived and remarkably fresh.

I'm a huge Michael Moorcock fan so the biggest disappointment here is undoubtedly his 'The Frozen Cardinal' which I thought was just daft although the treatment of women in many of the tales was an equally disappointing experience with both Tanith Lee's 'Crying in the Rain' and Christopher Evans' 'The Facts of Life' reducing them to mere property and Lisa Tuttle's 'The Wound' to that of a mutation.

Ian Watson's 'The Emir's Clock' is an interesting piece with a dumb ending and R.M. Lanning's 'Sanctity' was an interesting set up to an ending that reminded me of  Monty Python joke and David Langford's ' In a Land of Sand and Ruin and Gold' owed a real debt to Moorcock's 'Dancers at the End of Time' series.

Graham Charnock's 'Fulwood's Web' was an entertainingly old fashioned bit of 'man shouldn't meddle' fun. David Garnett's 'Moonlighter' gave a tweak to the hoary old parallel dimension trope whilst M. John Harrison's 'Small Heirloom's' was intriguing but needed far more room than it had here. Gary Kilworth's 'Triptych' was one interesting idea sandwiched between two lesser ones but Keith Roberts' 'Piper's Wait' was very much the redemption of the book's latter half.

As I said an inconsistent read redeemed entirely by Holdstock's tale but not without a smattering of other interests strewn across it's pages.

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Mythago Wood

Robert Holdstock
Gollancz

Deep within the wildwood lies a place of myth and mystery, from which few return, and none remain unchanged.
Ryhope Wood may look like a three-mile-square fenced-in wood in rural Herefordshire on the outside, but inside, it is a primeval, intricate labyrinth of trees, impossibly huge, unforgettable... and stronger than time itself.
Stephen Huxley has already lost his father to the mysteries of Ryhope Wood. On his return from the Second World War, he finds his brother, Christian, is also in thrall to the mysterious wood, wherein lies a realm where mythic archetypes grow flesh and blood, where love and beauty haunt your dreams, and in promises of freedom lies the sanctuary of insanity.

A little while back I had a real hankering for something featuring trees; something where a wood was central to the story.  Not just as a location but as a character, a defining point within the story.  I bought a couple of things I saw around - 'The Vorrh' and 'Wychwood' - but neither delivered the fix I wanted but as luck would have it a 'What are you reading?' post on the Wyrd Britain Facebook page brought this one to my attention and I'm so glad it did.

The wood of the title is Ryhope Wood in Herefordshire a tiny woodland that you could walk around in a couple of hours but which could take you a more than a lifetime to walk through - a TARDIS wood if you will.

The wood is one of the last remaining pieces of the ancient woodland that once covered the country - it is the very heart and soul of Britain - and in it can be found all the myths and legends of the land in the form of 'Mythagos', defined by Holdstock as "myth imago, the image of the idealized form of a myth creature".  Myths and legends created from and filtered through the minds of those intruding upon its confines; if, for instance, the defining consensus of Robin Hood is as the tights wearing, acrobatic, chivalrous righter of wrongs then that's the 'mythago' that will be presented but as the consensus shifts to perceiving him as a sadistic, arrogant woodland terrorist then...

The novel tells of Stephen Huxley's reluctant return to his family home following his experiences fighting in Europe during WWII.  The home where his recently deceased father had based his obsessive research on Ryhope Wood and where Stephen's brother Christian seems to be following in his footsteps.  Once there, as Christian disappears into the depths of the wood, Stephen begins his own journey.

At it's heart the book is a rumination on the centrality of legend, of myth and of story in the British identity.  The Wood encapsulates the entirety of the British mythic identity and feeds it back to the observer.  The stories and their characters have a strength to them that enables them to both adapt and endure as can be seen through the actions of such mythagos as 'Guiwenneth' and 'Sorthalan' and in the way Stephen's own journey through the Wood, his quest for love and for revenge, acquires an increasing mythic resonance.

I also wonder if Holdstock was maybe making a more subtle point, an accusation of blame perhaps, as to the loss or lessening of the relevance of myths within British culture as it transpires that it's the arrival and actions of the 'outsider', (the) Christian, that's damaging the Wood and all it holds.

Mythago Wood proved to be that most rare of beasts a truly transformative novel.  One that took hold of me from the off and twisted and writhed and caressed and gnawed and stared and whispered and grinned and punched at me for the entire time I was reading and is still running riot around the back of my head several weeks later.

I adored this book,  unequivocally adored it.

Buy It Here

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Eight Ghosts: The English Heritage Book of New Ghost Stories

Various
English Heritage

Rooted in place, slipping between worlds - a rich collection of unnerving ghosts and sinister histories.Eight authors were given after hours freedom at their chosen English heritage site. Immersed in the history, atmosphere and rumours of hauntings, they channelled their darker imaginings into a series of extraordinary new ghost stories.
Within the walls of these historic buildings each author has found inspiration to deliver a new interpretation of the classic ghost story.

This odd little book contains eight stories by contemporary writers each set at an English Heritage site.  For the most part the various authors plump for something ghostly and strange in a typically spooky environment with the exception of Mark Haddon's science fiction tale set in the York Cold War Bunker.

Most of the participants bring the goods with Sarah Perry's inexplicable revulsion in 'They Flee From Me That Sometime Did Me Seek' and Jeanette Winterson's love story 'As Strong As Death being particular stand outs.

The book proved to be a ridiculously quick read and I was closing the covers on it after less than 2 hours having devoured the 8 tales and skimmed the article on the genesis of the English ghost story by Andrew Martin and entirely skipped - due to a lack of interest - the 'Gazateer of English Hauntings'

So, a - very - quick read but in the main an enjoyable one although perhaps lacking somewhat in content.

Buy it here - Eight Ghosts: The English Heritage Book of New Ghost Stories

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If you enjoy what we do here on Wyrd Britain and would like to help us continue then we would very much appreciate a donation towards keeping the blog going - paypal.me/wyrdbritain