PS Publishing 2024, cover by Vince Haig

I was immediately intrigued by this anthology of all-new stories set in the world of Robert Holdstock’s Mythago Wood. I wavered a bit over reading it, at first, as generally I’m not so much into fictional worlds as I am the works of individual creators, but all the same I was intrigued to see what other writers might make of Holdstock’s ideas, when there’s so much to explore. What finally decided me was the thought that, if nothing else, these stories were sure to throw some interesting light on Holdstock’s own work.

It’s an anthology of roughly two halves. First, we have the stories of people coming to the wood and encountering the mythagos it generates. A lot of these had the same basic pattern (which isn’t a criticism): childhood memories, or the rumours of something strange going on, usually combined with some loss either in the past or the present, would draw someone to the wood, and there they would start to see that characteristic flickering at the edges of their vision. What worked in this sort of tale was the way it was presented. John Langan’s “Et in Acadia” (not a typo), for instance, is told entirely by a group of adult siblings, reminiscing about their terminally ill brother, and the strange games he led them in as children. Here, it’s the unreliability and variability of memory—particularly of childhood viewed from many years later—that allows the magic to leak through: what’s accepted as a child can only be revealed in all its true strangeness when it’s revisited as an adult. My favourite of this type of story was “Voici Les Neiges d’Antan” by Chaz Brenchley, about the easy friendship of an adolescent boy and girl, who have for years been entering a wood near where they holiday, spending time with what they know is no ordinary being—either a fairy or a mythago—but now one of them decides they want to take things further, go deeper into the wood and meet something different. It’s written with a very light touch, but hits the sense of loss—which is embedded in Holdstock’s work and pretty much every story in this collection—spot on.

The other main type of story, here, is tales of mythagos themselves. These often take place entirely within the woods. They tend to be the more impressionistic or experimental pieces, relying less on plot and more on a sort of evocation of the strange state of being that a mythago must experience. Just to name a couple of favourites, I liked “Mad Pranks and Merry Jests” by Jen Williams for its refusal to be consolatory, and “Calling the Tune” by Lucy Holland, which presented, in scenes scattered across time, the development of a particular mythago from its originating event to its most characteristic, archetypal form, and then to a modern-day manifestation. (And one of the points of interest throughout this anthology is how modern elements get integrated into the world of Ryhope Wood, such as podcasts, mobile phones, internet rumours and the mythago-seeking subcultures that chase those rumours.)

There are a few stories that don’t fit either type. Adrian Tchaikovsky’s “Paved with Gold”, for instance, in which London is treated as a mythago-generating landscape, was perhaps more the sort of thing I was expecting from this anthology, applying as it does Holdstock’s idea to new landscapes. Tchaikovsky brings out some good ideas, such as how national myth-figures, in their mythago forms, might have a particular attraction for certain ideologies. Another story I immediately liked was “Into the Heart” by Alan Stroud, set in a scientific institute where a mythago has been captured for study—but, of course, there’s no possibility of scientific observation of a mythago, because the observer is as much a part of it as its originating myth.

As to the light these tales threw on Holdstock’s work: one thought I found popping into my head after reading some of them was “mythagos aren’t therapy”. In a few of the stories, it seemed, the mythagos went out of their way to work towards the sort of resolution—in one case, I seem to recall, even laying out a psychological explanation in modern terms—that just didn’t fit with the far more savage process in Holdstock’s novels. Can it, though, be said that Holdstock’s mythagos aren’t therapy? There’s certainly a psychological need behind them—one view of the Huxley family’s interactions with the wood, and in particular with the mythago Guiwenneth, is that it all stems from the loss of Jennifer Huxley, George’s wife and the boys’ mother, and their attempt to compensate for that. I’m pretty sure it’s stated in one of Holdstock’s novels that myths emerge when there is an irreversible change or loss. Myths and mythagos certainly have some sort of cathartic purpose, then, but the way that plays out in Holdstock’s novels is usually savage and excoriating. It’s the therapy of being stripped back to nothing and reborn—as in Tallis’s “I feel violated, consumed; yet I feel loved” from Lavondyss. Harsh, savage, dangerous and difficult, it’s hardly consolatory. Just look at how the mythago Guiwenneth plays out in interaction with each of the Huxley males: all of them lose her, usually multiple times, just as they lost their mother. It’s as though the mythago idea of therapy is to keep hitting you with the trauma till you’re so covered in scar tissue it no longer hurts.

Another thing that stands out is just how strange Holdstock’s own imagination could be, in those savage moments that produced, for instance, the image of a rider bound in burning straw on the back of a wild-running horse. There was something just so dark and archaic in his imagination, and it’s only when you see his ideas in other hands that you realise just how unique to him those moments were. (I think Maura McHugh comes closest, in her story, “Raptor”.)

I will say that I was surprised how many of the tales in Heartwood returned to Ryhope Wood. I’d expected a lot more different locations from around the world, and myths from different cultures. (Perhaps there could be a follow-up anthology, Mythago World.)

Mythago stories are tricky. At what point does a mythago story become just a ghost story, or a monster-in-the-woods story? I still don’t know if I could tell what made the mythago idea so characteristically different. (In the first book, it was perhaps the science fictional approach to fantasy material, but that’s not so much true of the subsequent novels.) Certainly, though, a lot of the writers in this volume—clearly fond of Holdstock’s work—have grasped it.