Lore of the Saelvatici

This is a tricky book to review because it’s not like anything else I’ve ever read – and I have read a lot of books, and I read broadly. After some reflection I think you’re most likely to go for this as a reader if you’re into folk horror as a genre. It isn’t exactly folk horror, it’s more like the backstory that a contemporary folk horror narrative would allude to before leaving a contemporary character to die trapped inside a hollow oak.

For Pagan readers there may well be some amusement in the set-up – the ancient manuscript transcribed only to disintegrate leaving no real evidence. Steven C Davis clearly knows his stuff, and this is all very knowing. The lost but recreated manuscript tells of old gods, terrifying forests, human violence and horror. The book is an assemblage of fragments, in many ways more like poetry than a novel. I’m fairly convinced it’s a spell designed to enchant the reader and make space in their head for those old forest gods to enter in. I can honestly say I experienced it that way.

Quite some years ago, I read Wake by Paul Kingsnorth – a book set in much the same timeframe and also dealing with Norman conquest, religious upheaval and violence. I found Wake disappointing, and did not try to review it. At the same time, I felt it misleadingly offered things I wanted and failed to deliver on them. That book is on my mind now because Lore of the Saelvatici is in many ways an answer to how Wake left me feeling. This is the imagined history I needed.

That the writing is lyrical makes the violence a lot easier to bear. This is a bloody book, and many of the scenes in it do not go well for those involved. There’s a lot of death, murder, sacrifice… there’s also a lot of sexual violence. I’m generally not good at coping with sexual violence in books, but I managed to deal with the content here, and I think if you’re braced for it you’ve got a reasonable chance. It’s easier, in many ways, when violence is presented as horror and not as something titillating.

This is not a book for everyone, but if this is the kind of writing that attracts you, then you are going to love this. Strange, wild, uneasy and powerful material, it may well do things to you. The world would be a more interesting place of more of us had forest gods inside our heads.

You can find it on Amazon – https://www.amazon.co.uk/Lore-Saelvatici-Steven-C-Davis/dp/0956514731