HEARTWOOD

Reviewed by Steven H Silver

While fantasy novels often include magic, it is rare that the novel itself is magical. Robert Holdstock's Mythago Wood, and its sequel Lavondyss, are, perhaps, two novels which feel as if the magic they describe really exists. Throughout those books, as well as The Hollowing and Gate of Ivory, Gate of Horn, Holdstock has created a world the taps into the primeval myths that speak to the most basic nature of humanity. To honor the fortieth anniversary of Mythago Wood's original publication, editor Dan Coxon has edited Heartwood, a Festschrift allow other authors to explore Holdstock's themes, imagery, and conception.

In "Transient in Green," RJ Barker offers the deep forest as a place to gain closure. Gareth Wayne is seeking to flee from the fact that he accidentally killed his friend, Clancy Moss. His journey into a wooded area only heightens his sense of guilt and prosecution, but Barker's language attempts to build an emotional setting a little too much to be fully satisfying.

Adrian Tchaikovsky applies Holdstock vision of Mythago Wood to the city of London in "Paved with Gold." Rees heads a group which is trying to find and understand the mythagos that inhabit the city, which can be as dark and foreboding as the ones found in Ryhope Forest. Omar is going along with the rest of the group, as much for a lark as because he really believes it, until Monica crosses paths with the Ripper mythago and their explorations take on a very real danger. Tchaikovsky's London has the same primeval essence as Holdstock's forest, capturing the sense of exploration, the mix of the unknown and the familiar, and portent of Mythago Wood.

Tim Waggoner returns to the idea of the wood being a place for catharsis with "Here There Be Monsters," although more successfully than Barker's story. Waggoner's focus is on Kirk, returning to the Elderwood of his youth to get some closure. Sixteen years earlier, on a vacation, Kirk and his twin sister, Jo-jo, entered the woods to get a respite from their arguing parents. While there, his sister was captured by a mythago named the Gork while he fled. He has now returned, folklore doctorate in hand and following the death of his father, to gain a sense of closure over his lost sister.

Soffi has received a residency at Yhery Gate Lodge to work on the script for a puppet show in Maura McHugh's "Raptors." Although the point of the residency is to provide Soffi with seclusion to work on her art, she finds herself distracted by things she can't explain, and often finds disturbing. Drawings she makes to help her creative process seem to come to life and she herself seems to be transformed, slowly, into a mythago that is unstuck in time, connecting her to the woman who created the residency as well as the aunt from who she inherited Yhery Gate Lodge. McHugh captures the tricks that the mind can play on a person who is overly isolated in this take of protection.

James Brogden has set "Horsey Horsey" on an island in the Orkneys. The story takes the form of an old man telling a story to a pub full of people, at least one of whom is recording it for posterity. Although the story focuses on his own family, and his mother, who is seen as insane, it also refers to a mythical creature the natives talk about called the Nuckalvee, or the Nuck. Although the Nuck is a mythago, the story also describe the mythago of an ancient forest that appears that is a memory of the time when the sunken Doggerland formed part of the landscape. Brogden's story demonstrates there is a very slight difference of emphasis between Holdstock's mythago stories and Lovecraft's Cthulhu stories.

John Langan offers "Et in Acadia," set in a house located on the coast of Maine. Garrett's three siblings have come together to be with their brother when he dies. Each of them has had some time alone with him and are now hanging out in his family room, waiting for the end and sharing memories of growing up with each other. While Garrett's youngest sibling, his brother, Brennan, is happy to share his memories, Janine is more reticent, perhaps because the memories that don't seem to fit with the logical world make her uncomfortable. Langan's story is an excellent portrayal of a family reminiscing in the face of a pending death, the three siblings demonstrating love, frustration, concern, fear, and many other emotions. What begins as a recollection of a childhood memory of a beach holiday becomes more magical as Brennan tells the story of building a boat in the woods out of tree branches. His sisters , who had long forgotten or suppressed the memory, find themselves adding details from Brennan's tale, as well as their own that tend to corroborate the story he is telling and reinforce the concept that Garrett had a way to see the magic in the world around them and capture and share that magic with his siblings. The story is bittersweet in its portrayal of those memories, seen through the golden haze of nostalgia while waiting for Garrett's death.

Cliff has lost his wife, Beth in Paul Kane's "The Crossing Place." Although Cliff is a scientist and thinks of himself as rational, Beth had the belief that there was more to the world that could be explained by science. She and Cliff made a vow that when one of them died, the dead partner would attempt to send a message to the survivor to indicate there was an afterlife. Driven by grief, Cliff eventually rents a remote cottage in the woods, despite being warned by the locals that strange things happen there. Owned by the Huxley family, whose experiences were documented by Holdstock in Mythago Wood, the cottage proves to offer Cliff experiences he can't fully explain, and he does reunite with Beth, although Kane introduces enough ambiguity into the situation to allow the reader to decide what "really" happened to Cliff.

The world has changed markedly since Holdstock published Mythago Wood in 1984. Gary Budden obliquely examines that change in "What Happened to the Green Boy?" John Green disappeared into a Shadox Wood when he was a child. Just as the events described in Holdstock's novel, the boy's disappearance was a local story, but that was all. However, years later, the internet, and specifically a podcast, has learned of Green's disappearance into the woods and has decided to try to figure out what happened to him. They have discovered one of Green's friends, who is willing to speak to them about his involvement, or lack of involvement, with his friend, dredging up memories and guilt that had lain dormant for decades.

Death is a recurring theme in the stories published in Heartwood, possibly because the promise of Ryhope Wood and the mythagos is a place where death does not hold sway. Langan looked at a family waiting for death to visit and Kane looked at a man coming to terms with the loss of his wife. Justina Robson's narrator in "The Dog on the Hookland Road" is cleaning up her father's house following his own death and is also dealing with the decades old disappearance of her mother into the woods, chasing a black dog. Going through her father's papers, she learns that her mother's disappearance may not have been as complete as people thought and finds indications that her father may have had some connection to her after she vanished. Despite her own encounter with something strange in Ryhope Wood, she is able to hope that her parents have been reunited on the other side of death.

Many of the characters in the stories featured in Heartwood seem unaware of any potential for danger when they enter a woods, as if the forest are tame and civilized. In Chaz Brenchley's "Voice les Neiges d'Antan" Kit and Sunday are well aware of the dangers. Teenagers, they made their parents promises about how they would interact with the woods near their home and they made further promises among themselves to help ensure they would always be able to keep their primary promise to their parents: to be home at sunset. As they have grown older, they are more willing to push the boundaries, but are still careful about exploring the previously unexplored heartwood, although their relationship with the Hob who lives in a howe in the heartwood, makes them feel safer about pushing those boundaries. Having met the Hob and understanding the magical nature of the wood, Sunday, in particular, is hoping to meet Robin Hood, who the Hob assures her exists in the wood.

Mark Morris's "Old Coal" creates a sense of deja vu. It tells the story of Jay, whose twin sister, Jen, disappears in Ryhope Woods, much like the set up to Waggoner's "Here There Be Monsters." However, Morris deals with the immediate aftermath of Jen's disappearance: their parents' fears, the police search and questioning, and the feeling of estrangement, although see through the eyes of the child that Jay is. Time jumps show the way Jay's life has progressed as he put the loss of his beloved sister into the past, occasionally even wondering if she really existed or was some imaginary sibling. While Kirk in Waggoner's story focuses his life on finding out what happened to his sister, Jay manages to move on, until he receives a strange invitation inviting him back to Ryhope Woods to learn what happened to Jen. The pacing is a little off in the story, but Morris manages to capture Jay's anguish, the subsidence of the loss, and eventually hope.

At first, Ryhope Wood is a place of sanctuary in Steven Savile's "The Myth of Grief," about an escaped murderer who elects to hide out in the wood as a way of eluding the manhunt trying to track him down. The woods, or possibly a poor selection of mushrooms to eat, however, soon convince him that he may not have made the wisest decision. Entirely unremorseful over the murder of his girlfriend Evelyn, he finds himself facing the spirits of an old man and visions of the woman Evelyn might have become. Savile the setting and hallucinations to begin to explore the origins of mythagos, with the idea of Evelyn gaining power and having an influence on her murderer despite his lack of contrition. Savile handles the descent into madness and the rise of a new mythago well, in a way that adds to the lore of Ryhope Wood.

One aspects of Mythago Wood was that George Huxley was trying to study the wood and the mythagos using the relatively primitive means at his disposal. Allen Stroud follows up on that study with "Into the Heart," which brings a mythago out of the wood and inter a modern laboratory, where Jennifer Halshaw is attempting to study the specimen she calls Jacob. Unfortunately, nothing about Jacob registers on scientific equipment. He can be seen through a camera, but his image doesn't appear on film. There is no way to record his heartbeat or even his voice. Told as a juxtaposition of emails expressing concern about Halshaw's unconventional methods and her actual methods, Jacob's story, repeated throughout history, comes to life as Halshaw and her assistant come to realize that they may be the next victims of the story if they can't find a way to escape the strength of the legend. The story is one of the stronger ones in the anthology, possibly because of the juxtaposition of science that tries to understand everything and a force of nature that moves forward without caring about understanding.

Lisa Tuttle offers another story in which the mystical wood is the Ryhope of Holdstock's novels, although in a more modern period. "Lovely, Dark and Deep" tells the story of the wood's through Nadia's eyes. After coming across a reference to a lawsuit regarding the woods in the 2020s, she recalls visiting them at the turn of the millennium and becoming involved in an effort to save them from development. mostly told as a flashback, the story details Nadia meeting Julian and Chris, two people trying to get a petition to save Ryhope Wood from development. When they attempts meet with indifference from the locals, they decide to burn down the one house that has already been built in the forest, only to get lost by Ryhope's unique location. Tuttle mentions the characters of Holdstock's books and also the real life theorists whose work Holdstock referenced in writing the novels. Although much of the story appears to be straightforward and predictable for anyone familiar with the idea of Ryhope Wood, Tuttle does manage a clever twist, which was subtly set up in the early part of the story.

In "Prey," Matthew Ward sets up what seems like a fairly typical tale of an ancient wood. Diana's husband, Thomas, has been killed by a mythago and Diana has entered the wood to track and kill it, although once in the wood she begins to question who is tracking whom. His revelation that the mythago that killed her husband is more than just an archetype, but self-aware of itself as an archetype, turns the story into a much more interesting exploration of the concepts behind Holdstock's story, as does the revelation that Diana's hunt has, apparently, been repeated in a cycle over the course of two centuries. Ward introduces shades of gray that are often lacking, raising the question of what reality is and how mythagos fit into that.

Numerous tales set in forests focus on children who have lost their way or been kidnapped. Jen Williams gives a guided tour of some of those lost children in "Mad Pranks and Merry Jests," which places Puck in the role of a tour guide for a young girl who has run away from home. As they delve deeper and deeper into the wood, Puck's friendly and helpful demeanor take on threatening undertones as the spirit reveals the truth behind stories like Hansel and Gretel and Peter Pan, warning his ward about looking at them too closely, while seeming to promise that a similar fate awaits her, even as she was fleeing from an abusive home. Williams tells a story which has a lot of tension and emotional resonance and leaves the reader wishing it were fleshed out even more.

While generally mythagos are seen as eternal, at east from the time they are first conceived, in "Hearts of Ice," Peter Haynes takes a different look at them. Focusing on the mythago known as Hood, Haynes looks at what happens when a new force comes into being in the forest and attempts to take over an already existing mythago. As Hood attempts to continue his existence, he begins to feel pressure from this new force that seemingly wants to take over his essence. It is an interesting take on the ideas of mythagos, although the otherworldliness of the forest has a tendency to get in the way of the narrative.

Despite the ancient nature of Ryhope Wood, most of the stories in Heartwood are set within the last 150 years. Lucy Holland, however, takes a different tack with "Calling the Time." Holland has selected a well-known legend and filed off the serial numbers. She then proceeds to tell the story multiple times, each time in a different era, starting with early human tribes, following them through the pagan era and the coming of Christianity. As the story repeats across the millennia, each time with changes, it begins to become more recognizable. In this way, Holland reinforces the inexorable nature of the mythagos and using Holdstock's world to really focus on the importance of folklore and the unchanging nature of humanity.

Aliya Whitely revisits the "Matter of Britain" with "The Known Song," exploring the love of Nynyve, although Whitely puts a twist on it, making Nynyve's lover a mystery to her. In "The Known Song," the sorceress becomes the unwitting pawn of the yew tree in which she will eventually imprison her anonymous lover. Whitely uses familiar characters but undermines any expectations the reader may have, which serves to allows a nuanced and alternative exploration of the characters, their relationships, and their motivations.

"Knight of the Air," by Gareth Hanrahan, closes out the anthology. It is the story of Malcolm, a man who has become interested in planes and airfields from the World War. An aerial photograph of a forested area that seemingly shows a crashed plane that has never been accounted for or even described as missing. His investigations take him away from home, to London, and eventually to a Ryhope Woods several years after the events described by Holdstock. Malcolm's foray into the woods leads him to encounter several oddities, including the crashed plane and animated skeletons that seek to stop him from leaving the woods, although Hanrahan introduces an element of doubt as to whether his adventures actually happened or if everything from the encounter to the supernatural to the discover of the plane in the woods was simply the result of an overactive imagination.

Many of the stories look at Holdstock's creation, with several of them showing influence even if they are not set in the same milieu. As Holdstock's original setting, England is quite well representing, with the US following it, but little representation in other countries, although Russia does get a strong shout out in one of the stories. THe authors in Heartwood have attempted to capture the feel of Holdstock's work and many more success than fail. For fans of Mythago Wood and its sequels, Heartwood is a satisfying visit to the forest primeval.

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