A deeply atmospheric tale set amidst the Cornish moors of the 18th century
Some books are heavy on plot, some on worldbuilding, some on character, some on vibe. Gorse, the debut novel of Cornish author Sam K. Horton, leads instead with atmosphere, and a sense of place so sharp it cuts.
Set in a small village in the moors in the late 18th century, this is a story that could be nowhere else but Cornwall. Every part of it, every word, every plant, every folkloric motif draws from its location, whether real or invented. It is a story full of flowers, trees and bogs, of smells on the air and weather, of sensation. Even after only a few pages it is a story that has deeply, thoroughly immersed you in its location, because that's where its magic is, and comes from... both in a metaphorical sense and a rather more literal one.
We follow Pel, the Keeper of the High Moor, a man charged with maintaining balance between the human world and the unseen world of the fey, along with his partially estranged ward Nancy. They both can see the spirits, sprites and fairies that infest the countryside, giving help and harm to the people around them, while remaining invisible to nearly all. They mediate, give charms and spells to those in need, bind things that threaten, and work to keep the world ticking over and in good order. But there are murders happening, sinister deaths that leave a burnt handprint on the victims' neck, and the vicar is starting to cast blame at those who he claims believe in devils. Tensions are high, and more and more people turn from the old traditions towards the church. The balance is no longer being maintained, and Pel's pride, his wounded ego, are holding him back from offering the help the village sorely needs. We watch as events unfold, as a promise of doom begins to build like storm clouds over this community, and the events that ensue.
Much like the sense of place, a lingering feeling of doom building up suffuses every page. It becomes very quickly apparent that Gorse is not a cheery novel, and that it takes its mode of fantasy from the old sort of folkloric tales, replete with death and vengeance, and bloody prices and sacrifices required for what is owed. This is not a story that glamorises magic, or the people who practice it, nor is it one where its magic can be systemised and categorised—there is nothing of D&D in this fantasy, only the raw stuff of old legends, where the logic of intuitive sense holds sway. It is a story about grim survival in the face of horrifying things, of forces beyond control except by those willing to pay the price. But it is also, very deeply, a story about people, and about a war between two ways of seeing the world, one that will allow peaceful co-existence, and another that demands no path but its own.
And that it does immensely well—the mythic quality of it all shines through on every page, and maintains a remarkably clear atmosphere throughout. But there is a catch to it. With that palpable doom, with the elevated tone of the mythic, comes distance. Horton's prose keeps its characters at arm's length, even when we are deeply invested in their point of view, in their feelings about a situation. We watch someone go through awful grief, and yet that grief fails to touch us, because the story always keeps us outside of the situation: an observer, not a passenger. It's a double-edged sword. Without this feeling of distance, without the dispassionate narrative voice, the story simply would not have the folkloric vibes it so painstakingly maintains. But that choice comes at a cost, and it is felt most painfully in moments of intense character emotion. It seems, in this story at least, you cannot have both.
And it is a shame, because both Nancy and Pel, as close as we get to them, are incredibly compelling characters to watch. They both have their burdens, their angers and their passions, and we see both of them go through some really quite emotive situations. But where another writer—a Guy Gavriel Kay, for instance—could twist this into sorrow that genuinely provokes tears, Horton never quite manages to stick the knife in, emotionally speaking, and it feels like a story that would merit it and feel the better for it. Sometimes, you—or at least I—like a good sweet sorrow type of story, where the sadness is so exquisitely crafted it is transformed into something wonderful and nearly addictive. There are moments here where I desperately wanted that. I saw a character reach that point, but because I felt kept outside of their mind, outside of their experience, I could never quite connect enough to them and what they were going through, what they were feeling, for the sorrow to hit just right. For Nancy, this means seeing someone—someone whose determination and goodness make her very easy to like—go through tragedy, heartbreak and rage, and not feel quite connected to it. Sad, frustrating, but still an arc whose narrative beats make sense to us, show us what sort of story it is. For Pel the struggle is greater, because he is such an interesting and difficult character. We spend much of the story watching his ego, his need for control, and his superiority get in the way of him making the right decisions, or indeed meaning he feels that he's the only one who can make those decisions, even when they impact the people around him. He's frankly insufferable at times, and it is very easy to sympathise with Nancy's irritation and fights with him. But we get glimmers, especially in moments of interaction with her, that there's a lot more going on under the surface with him. And because we are denied access to the fullness of his interiority, we are likewise denied an emotional connection to what drives him to be as he is, which makes the character so much less. I wanted, at so many points, to like him. We can see he is trying to do good, to help the world, to do his duty. But he gets himself in the way of his solutions so often that it would be rewarding to have access to the emotional narrative that drives all of that. As I say, we get glimmers. There are little moments that do give us pieces of it. It's enough that you know it's there. But just not quite enough to sink your teeth into.
There is, too, an issue with the tone of the book. The sense of incoming doom mentioned above is constant, from very early on, and it is increasingly easy to become numb to it. There's no narrative respite, so our capacity to appreciate the doom lessens as we grow accustomed. Had there been brief interludes—and they would only need to be brief—I think I would have appreciated that cold sense of impending disaster all the more, because it would keep biting me afresh.
But... both of these, problems though they might be, are also fitting. That doom, that detached tone, all feed into a coldness in the novel that is so absolutely fitting to both the story it is trying to tell and the place it is trying to evoke. Everything here comes back to place. You cannot escape it. To read it is to feel the chill of the wind and the rain, and I was intensely glad this was an autumn release, one I read just as the temperature here in the UK is taking a dip into chill, and I could hold a cup of tea close for comfort while reading. The brittle wintriness of the landscape of the Cornish moor escapes off the page and into the reader with ease.
And so too the folklore. Some of the aspects of the story were familiar to me—the giants Gog and Magog loom large (wahey) over English tales beyond just Cornwall, but some were either entirely new or close but not exactly the thing that I knew from my own upbringing elsewhere in England. At one point, Nancy sings:
See-saw, Margery Daw,
And here, I think, I know this one. But then she follows it with:
Sold her bed and lay on the straw.
Sold her bed and lay upon hay.
And Pisky came and carried her away.
Whereas the rhyme in my memory has her receiving only a penny a day for the slow speed of her work. But this is the traditional Cornish version, apparently. It is not English folklore, because folklore like this cannot be genericised in that way. It is tied to a place, and a place as experienced by one person, or one community, and it is the greatest strength of the story—this understanding that the magical and the mythic can be so intimately bound up in the living world, and thus to the particularities of a place.
We see occasional intrusions of myth from outside—though there are no coasts or mines on the moor here, buccas and spriggans visit—but those externalities are consciously rebuffed in favour of the people and magics of this place. Which is not to say it's a story where only those of a particular location are able to enact its magic, which is a less pleasant direction these types of stories can sometimes go in. Pel, we are told, journeyed here from elsewhere and became the Keeper because it was the way he could prove himself the best at what he did. People, it seems, do not need to be tied to their locations, just the magic—it is enough to know it, to make yourself familiar with it, in order to be able to wield it. I have more time for this as a thesis on folkloric magic. He brought some of where he came from with him, but blended it with the place he came, and so, even in a story that is so utterly rooted in a singular location, there is an understanding that these types of stories, these mythologies, have always been as transitory as the people who tell them.
Ultimately, I found it a successful book. I was willing to be carried away, to see with clear eyes a moor covered in gorse and heather, dotted with tors and the dangers of bog and marsh. I wanted to feel its wind and rain, and be a little afraid of its dangers along with the characters. And it achieves that atmosphere absolutely perfectly. Where it suffers is in the closer, more human work, and I am, ultimately, willing to forgive it that (even though it's often the thing I care most about in stories) because its delivery of atmosphere, of this bottling of a place and time, is so exquisite and unusual in its intensity. I don't think I've read anything quite like it in a number of years. It brings to mind perhaps, most clearly, Sarah Perry's work—the creeping winter chill of Melmoth or the open bleakness of The Essex Serpent. The landscape is different, but some of the intent is the same. And all three are books best savoured in the cold weather, with something warm to comfort you from them.
Highlights: atmosphere in heaps and spades, sadness and doom, intimate folklore and feeling of a specific place and time
Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.
Reference: Horton, Sam K. Gorse [Solaris, 2024].
POSTED BY: Roseanna Pendlebury, the humble servant of a very loud cat. @chloroformtea.bsky.social
