Folk horror in the forest
(Nimue)
Some books are easy to review. This is the other sort because it is brilliant and at the same time it definitely won’t be to everyone’s taste.
We all know Sherwood as a place of camp, swashbuckling adventure. Sherewode, on the other hand, is a mysterious, dangerous forest where old Gods walk, and many of the monsters are human. Called by mad stag goddess Caerne, The Hooded are rising to fight the forces invading the forest.
This is definitely a folk horror novel. It draws heavily on folklore, and it’s both violent and unsettling. There’s a lot of death, and the constant threat of sexual violence, but there’s nothing unbearably graphic. However, the story is not folk-horror shaped. In many ways, it is the people who are the source of the horror – as is normal in the genre. But there are no innocent outsiders here, no Pagan traditions impinging on a modern world. Everyone is complicit in some way, and the dark, violent horrors of the forest are of everyone’s making.
The cast is massive and there are a lot of different perspectives. If that’s a dealbreaker for you, don’t venture in. You have to spend a while trusting the book as it hops around between the huge cast and trusting yourself that you will be able to keep track of them all. To further complicate matters, while these characters echo familiar folk from the Robin Hood stories, they are not as you know them. This is deliberately unsettling and disorientating at times. There’s an intrinsic uncanniness to it.
The writing style is often like an early epic – like The Tain, or Beowful, or something of that ilk. The language and phrasing is poetic, and often stark. The deeper we are in the forest, the more mythic the writing tends to be, and that also means that we don’t spend a lot of time exploring people’s feelings and motivations, that we just get the raw encounter with action.
Each one of the many characters believes in what they are doing. Their motives vary – revenge and greed are dominant forces, but care, protection, religion, and all the messy things religions inspire people to do are in the mix. While the old gods are present and unsettling, it is without a doubt the things characters do in the name of Christianity that are most disturbing. This is a vey mediaeval take on Christianity – full of burning people for the good of their souls, and seeing the forest as the enemy.
The main reason I know this is folk horror, is because of the way it will make you want to move in, if you’re that sort of person. If you’re drawn to the murder village, or looking for Cabal, if you’d welcome the bloodied stag girl with too many sharp teeth, if in your darker moments you would take out people who destroy forests for personal profit, then Sherewode will speak to you. If you identify with outcasts, with folk at the margins then you’ll feel at home here. That’s what folk horror does best.
This book is part of a series. You don’t need to have read any related material to jump in, and I will be reviewing the others – I have two more to read at present.
