As I type this, it has just turned to September. The bright, warm and sunny days of August are slowly changing to the darker, cooler and mellower days of Autumn. I believe I’ve said it before, but Autumn is perhaps my favourite season of the year, being cooler (but not too cool!) and with longer nights of darkness, and clear skies or mists, culminating in Hallowe’en in October.
My point for saying this is that I tend to find that my reading material changes too. Autumn and Winter are generally the time of year when I tend to read darker, messier, nastier stuff. Out come the Horror books or just good old Ghost Stories. There’s nothing quite like reading a chiller whilst you’re in the warm, away from the nasty ol’ weather outside.
Which brings me to Wychwood, one of this year’s batch of books new to me. It came out last year, but I missed it. However, with a second book due almost any day now, and that change in the weather, I thought it would be a good time to read the first.
Wychwood is one of those cross-genre books. It could very easily be a detective / crime novel, up there with the Ian Rankins or Val McDermids of the crime genre. However, if we’re trying to pigeonhole books (and yes, I know we really shouldn’t), it also fits into that subgenre I recognise as ‘folk-horror’.
Think The Wicker Man (book and film), or, in literary terms, Robert Holdstock’s Mythago Wood. More recently, I can think of Paul Cornell’s Lychford series of novellas, or Phil Rickman’s Merrily Watkins series. Notionally crime stories, with rather grisly goings on, but with the added dimension of something supernatural at work. They also usually have some sort of connection to Ancient History, and often British myths and folklore. For that treason, I must admit that I tend to think of these things as rural-based, although urban equivalents are possible – see (yes, him again!) Paul Cornell’s Shadow Police series or Ben Aaronovitch’s very successful Peter Grant series, both set in the city of London.
So: fitting the folk-horror archetype, Wychwood is one of those books set in a rural setting – bucolic Oxfordshire, in the made-up village of Wilsby-under-Wychwood. The book begins with journalist Elspeth (Ellie) Reeves returning back to the village after living in London. Redundancy and a messy relationship breakup has led her to go stay in the cottage with her Mum, where she grew up, on the edge of the neighbouring Wychwood where she used to play as a child. She returns to find the back of the house a murder scene, as a body has been ritually laid out in the forest. We discover that it is one of a series of killings in this normally quiet rural area, and Ellie’s reporting instincts make her an increasingly valuable asset to her childhood friend Detective-Sergeant Peter Shaw in the investigations.
As the deaths increase, Ellie recognises a pattern – that the bodies are being made to replicate the local Saxon myth of the Carrion King, who supposedly held court in the Wychwood. The tension is created by the realisation that the Carrion King had other members of his court – The Confessor, The Master of the Hunt, The Master of the Pentacle, The Fool and The King’s Consort – and that more murders will be necessary to make up the group.
But who is The Carrion King really? And who is next?
This one reads very smoothly, aided by short chapters that keep things moving along smartly. The characters are identifiable and easily understood. The village of Wilsby-under-Wychwood, Winthorpe Manor and the surrounding towns of Heighton and Chipping Norton (yes, there is a real place named that!) are iconically ‘chocolate-box’ British, with their small independent shops and pubs. Whilst there are signs of chain-stores (especially coffee shops) there is an emphasis on local entrepreneurship – for example, an old-fashioned pub called The Fletcher’s Arms, a local coffee & bookshop called The Reading Stop, with no signs of the global brands such as Waterstones, for example. (This does not stop the odd Americanism to slip-in, though – when did the British term ‘take-away’ become the American ‘take-out’, for example?)
Being set in a small but localised rural area means that there is an emphasis here on community and thus the chaos presented by multiple murders are felt more keenly. This is not without its difficulties in terms of plotting – the small local police force are clearly overwhelmed by suddenly finding a number of murders within a matter of days, no doubt something not really usual. In fact, such activities raises the murder rate to something akin to London! (In that respect, it reminded me a little of the television series Midsomer Murders.)
More troublingly, plot-wise, is how quickly Ellie finds herself assisting the police investigation. As a friend of Peter Shaw, her presence is acceptable, but her ability to be present at events and even find murder victims borders on the supernatural, and surely would either lead to compromised investigations or her being considered as a suspect herself. This is a sacrifice made to allow the plot to move along, but I can see it being an issue for some readers.
Nevertheless, if you can continue to suspend disbelief, there’s a lot to like about Wychwood. There’s a budding romance, which is gentle and not too cloying, and also suspects to examine, some of whom are nice and others are ones we’d love to see the back of. It’s all enjoyably escapist, as long as you don’t think about it too deeply. Suggest that readers of Harry Dresden or Merrily Watkins may like this one.
Wychwood by George Mann
Published by Titan Books, September 2017
400 pages
ISBN: 978-1785651403
Review by Mark Yon
