Fallow--book 8 in the Widdershins series, by Jordan L. Hawk

[Ulysses]

Fallow (Whyborne & Griffin #8)
Jordan L. Hawk
Cover by Lou Harper
ISBN: 978-1-941230-20-6
Four stars

Widdershins always knows its own.

As I characterized the first seven novels in a review for All About Romance early in 2016, Jordan Hawk’s Widdershins novels are sci-fi as written by Anthony Trollope, or the Palliser novels as made up by Ray Bradbury. The creative imagination of Ms. Hawk has fostered a world that mixes nostalgia, horror and love in equal parts. At its emotional core is the relationship between the effete, somewhat bumbling museum curator and scholar, Dr. Percival Endicott Whyborne, and the rough-and-tumble former Pinkerton detective Griffin Flaherty. Secondary to their pairing is that of Dr. Christine Putnam, blunt and proto-feminist Egyptologist who loves Whyborne like a brother; and her half-Egyptian husband Iskander Barnett. Although there are other characters who play important roles in different ways (depending on which book), in book eight it is this plucky quartet who once again leaves the Massachusetts city of Widdershins and heads to America’s heartland, Kansas, to the town of Fallow where Griffin was raised.

What I love most about Hawk’s series is its unabashed over-the-top sensibility, which mixes curiously with a rigorous interest in the past and a desire to educate. In “Fallow” such diverse issues as interracial marriage and female suffrage are plot points, and not gratuitously. There is a somewhat more realist approach to the descriptions of Fallow, because it is the historical truth of places like Fallow in American history that intrigues the author. Of course the magical/horror aspects are important—in this case a kind of echo of Stephen King’s “Children of the Corn.” But it is always so that even the most outrageous contortions of magic and the monsters behind it take second place behind Whyborne and Griffin’s self-declared marriage—the single most beautiful and unrealistic aspect of the whole series.

Griffin returns to Fallow—where he was adopted as an orphan, and whence he was exiled as a teenager when caught in flagrante with another boy—in order to make peace with his past. Whyborne follows him to Fallow as a prelude to confessing what he believes to be his dark truth—that all the horrors of Griffin’s life are Percival’s fault. Whyborne’s own sense of guilt—beaten into him by his rich and cruel father—becomes his obsession, and as they move to from the verdant coast of New England to the flat, bleak plains of the Midwest, Whyborne prepares to sacrifice his happiness in order to save Griffin’s.

Which is, of course, utter nonsense. As readers of this series, we all know this, but watching Whyborne torture himself is one of the many pleasures of Jordan Hawk’s inventive genius.