Book description
There is a landscape between reality and dreams, a strange and
primitive country that exists upon the edge of our waking world. Michael
Whitlock knows that country well. His best friend lives there...
It beings with a scatter of earth, thrown over the infant by unseen
hands, a haunting attack that is repeated day after day, culminating
with an explosive fall of mud that nearly kills the boy. And found in
those tons of raw, wet earth: flints, chalk artefacts, and remains of a
primitive shrine and the dismembered carcase of a hunting dog.
The Whitlocks' house, in the Kentish Weald, stands near a chalk-pit,
and it is here that their son, Michael creates his preculiar imaginary
world, making his camp by the pile of grave-earth from that early
attack. Unaware of what is happening to him, the boy touches and uses
the strange force that now ebbs and flows in the pit, And when the
haunting returns, this time it is more subtle, almost wonderful in its
secutive nature. Torn between a fear of the supernatural and greed for
the results of Michael's power, his adoptive parents are helpless. It is
left to Françoise Jeury, a psyhic investigator, to piece together the
bizarre truth of th epit and the shrine and the oddly silent boy.
Robert Holdstock (1948 - 2009)
Robert Paul Holdstock was born in a remote corner of Kent, sharing his
childhood years between the bleak Romney Marsh and the dense woodlands
of the Kentish heartlands. He received an MSc in medical zoology and
spent several years in the early 1970s in medical research before
becoming a full-time writer in 1976. His first published story appeared
in the New Worlds magazine in 1968 and for the early part of his career
he wrote science fiction. However, it is with fantasy that he is most
closely associated.
1984 saw the publication of Mythago Wood, winner of the BSFA and World
Fantasy Awards for Best Novel, and widely regarded as one of the key
texts of modern fantasy. It and the subsequent 'mythago' novels
(including Lavondyss, which won the BSFA Award for Best Novel in 1988)
cemented his reputation as the definitive portrayer of the wild wood.
His interest in Celtic and Nordic mythology was a consistent theme
throughout his fantasy and is most prominently reflected in the
acclaimed Merlin Codex trilogy, consisting of Celtika, The Iron Grail
and The Broken Kings, published between 2001 and 2007.
Among many other works, Holdstock co-wrote Tour of the Universe with
Malcolm Edwards, for which rights were sold for a space shuttle
simulation ride at the CN Tower in Toronto, and The Emerald Forest,
based on John Boorman's film of the same name. His story, 'The
Ragthorn', written with friend and fellow author Garry Kilworth, won the
World Fantasy Award for Best Novella and the BSFA Award for Short
Fiction.
Robert Holdstock died in November 2009, just four months after the
publication of Avilion, the long-awaited, and sadly final, return to
Ryhope Wood.
www. robertholdstock. com
For more information see www. sf-encyclopedia.
com/entry/holdstock_robert_p
