“I’ve been trying to show you over and over…”

The Man in the Moss – Phil Rickman

Bridelow is a village that’s hard to get to and they like it that way. It’s surrounded by a gigantic lake of moss, which has been treacherous to cross for centuries and if you lob your car off the side of the road it can get sucked in. The moss also returns things and that’s where this story gets its name and its major character. See, they find pieces of people who were interred (maybe) in the moss every so often. In Bridelow they bury them in the church yard once someone else also needs to be buried. But it is rare to get most of a person like the Man they find. The Man in the Moss, you see. Almost immediately the whole chunk of peat is sent to university for study and all the usual stuff when you find a well preserved dead person in peat and as soon as he’s gone, Bridelow starts having more issues than it can really reckon with well and it gets some good and terrible visitors. Unfortunately, the bog man does not like wake up and wreak havoc, I guess he actually wasn’t mad about being sacrificed probably for the safety of the area.

Phil Rickman is excellent at putting together an ensemble and discussing the clashes small and large of ancient pagan traditions, like Our Sheila at the church which really bothers the new fundamentalist type vicar. And he uses the supernatural well. The atmosphere and the sort of psychic powers of one Moira Cairns, who turns up in the only other Phil Rickman I’ve finished, are all well woven into the story. Also, the peat. Peat is one serious substance. And I was super excited about this story revolving around a bog body. The one time I’ve been to the British Museum, seeing the Lindow Man was one of my main goals (the other, ironically was seeing the Linares Family paper mache figures I knew they had- when Mexico is technically closer to the US, but I was already in England when I went to the museum, anyway, both goals achieved). It took me forever to find him because he’s sort of in a dark corner and he’s very crunched up. He honestly looked like a backpack skin-wise, but the level of preservation (beard hairs) is amazing.

The books Rickman writes seem to be consistently over 500 pages, but the pages do not seem wasted to me. I’m never reading and telling him to just get on with it, at least not in the two I’ve read and that bodes well for me reading the rest of his catalog. They just don’t take as long to read as you’d think a 594 page book would.

 

Horace just knows there’s a bog body inside this pumpkin village and it’s hiding something. Danger Crumples looks on from afar, knowing way more than Horace expects.