Book Review: Gorse by Sam K. Horton

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

Book Review: The Naming Song

An innovative and intriguing post-apocalyptic fantasy exploring the power of words

Our narrator does not have a name. This is somewhat unusual, but this is an unusual world. Our narrator and main character is a courier. In this society, clawing back from the apocalypse of what seems to be our own modern one, things are different. Many things, places, and ideas are no longer known or not defined. The courier “delivers” a word to express a thing, an action, an idea and make it firm into the world. In a very real way, in this brave new world, it makes it real and defined. Our courier protagonist without a name, though, in the course of being asked to deliver a new concept, soon runs afoul of powers who want to define the world for their own ends and power.

The courier's story is the story of Jedediah Berry’s The Naming Song.

Imagine a world where the concept of something doesn’t have a name until a committee of people decide to define it, that it needs a name. Gob. Gibbous. Velocity. Tedium. They perform divinations to come up with and find these words, and then it is the task of people like the courier, our protagonist, to deliver them. Only people with the right talent to hold a word in their heads can deliver a word; there is a nuance here. So, for example, if you wanted to punish a courier such as our protagonist, you might have her deliver unpleasant words, words whose communication is a nasty experience. Bruise. Trouble. Muck. Bleary. Toil.

And therein the story gets going. The novel takes a good while to actually move forward on the plot, since it has a lot of worldbuilding and a lot of things that the reader needs to at least be exposed to, if not quite understand and completely comprehend. In some ways that’s okay, because our characters themselves are in a story, a myth, a passion play, and they know it. We are hit pretty hard and quickly with just how strange and different this world is. There are ghosts, but not quite as you might expect them to be. There are monsters in this world too, created by people, and again the circumstances of what a monster is and where it comes from are not all entirely clear. This is a story that often runs on myth and the sharing of stories.

And the whole concept of named and nameless things. The nameless things and people outside the borders of what has been named and known are a nebulous threat and a problem for the named, for the unstable society of the committees trying to push back the boundaries of the undefined and unnamed, to name and categorize people, places and, of course, words. While our protagonist doesn’t see it, a clever reader can notice immediately the abuse an ambitious committee or its leader might put in such power, should they turn their minds to it. And so we have a world and an overarching metaplot to lay down our nameless courier’s own personal-plot.

Once we get the story in motion, it proceeds relatively straightforward, or at least it seems deceptively so. Our unnamed protagonist’s drive and desire is to reunite with her long lost sister, Ticket. Just where Ticket is, what she has been doing, and how this all connects with the machinations of a committee member seeking power, therein lies the tale. But that’s the ultimate backbone of the plot, and this is, as I said, more myth and shared story than an actual plot of events.

Post-apocalypse stories are extremely common, of course, but the idea of such a break as to how the universe actually works is somewhat less common. I’ve mentioned the roleplaying game Apocalypse World before in this space and it works very well here. The world broke, and now the rules are somewhat different. It’s clear that in the world of Apocalypse World, the Psychic Maelstrom did not exist before civilization fell, but now it is a fact of life. In the world of The Naming Song, now words have to be divined before they can be used, and the nameless and ghosts and the consequences of the Silence have to be dealt with.

In a fictional vein, I am reminded somewhat of Fred Saberhagen’s Empire of the East. In that series and ‘verse, the start of a nuclear war is stopped by the actions of a supercomputer which changes the laws of reality. As a result, nuclear weapons no longer work (but one has been turned into a demon), the supercomputer is a distant God, and magic indisputably now works. There is science and trying to recapture the knowledge of the ancients, but the world is now fundamentally different. So, too, S. M. Stirling’s The Change novels start with the laws of the universe around Earth altering, to very drastic results. That series takes a while to reveal that magic now works in the world (a sort of shamanistic magic), and not all characters believe or accept it, but it is now there, a fact of life. And as the timeline of the novel goes on, and there are no more characters who remember the Change itself, the world becomes very different very quickly.

One other way to think about this novel and its world is to consider the works of Matthew Hughes. Hughes’s work is very much the heir to Jack Vance’s Dying Earth, but a number of his stories and novels take place “before” the switchover to the magic-laden next world. One of the novels, The Spiral Labyrinth, has its protagonist temporarily get catapulted into the next world, where science is gone and magic rules, and we the reader, as well as the protagonist, now have to deal with a world whose operating system is now very different and not at all intuitively so.

The Naming Song short-circuits and accelerates this process of adaptation to the new operating rules of the universe by having the Silence, its own version of the Change, be so complete and so full that there is really no continuity of society and social structures from our modern world and the world that we get here. As a result, we wind up with a world where some things are used and barely understood, such as the trains themselves. It’s mentioned that not every aspect of the trains that make up such a big part of the novel are completely comprehended, which is, to forgive the pun, no way to run a railroad.

This makes the novel an interesting case of a world and a society that on reductionist terms and from first principles probably does not hold up under scrutiny. A world where the Silence happened probably can’t and doesn’t recover from such a calamity and civilization; it simply falls into irreversible anarchy. When you don’t even have the name for some basic concepts and ideas, how do you keep a train moving, or start one in the first place? Or guns? Or basic farming? So believing that humanity and society could be rebuilt from such a tremendous shock is definitely a “gimmie” in the novel, and it is an important one, given how, even hundreds of years later, society and the world are still evolving and changing.

This is a story about that liminality, of the borders between the defined and the undefined, and the consequences of trying to define things, and the fear of not defining them, of the borders between the known and the unknown, all told through the lens of a nameless courier in a very different future world. It’s a highwire act that I am not sure always succeeds, but there is no lack of its ambition and reach.

The heart of the book, in a story about stories and the way they can and do change the world, is that of “Hand and Moon.” We get glimpses, allusions and references to it throughout the book; it is a fundamental story to the people of this world, and in some ways, it is their monomyth (in the Campbellian sense). It is a story about naming, and love; and the heart of the book is when the Black Square players put on a performance of this story, even as the forces of tyranny come down upon them and everyone. It is no strange thing to have a performance of a story be the central axis of a story, but that is ultimately what this novel is. The Story of Hand and Moon sets the template of this world, and this performance, and how the players change it, ultimately changes the world. And thus The Naming Song is a story about the creation of stories and how the creation of stories and changing the way we tell them can create and change the world. Berry has created a world where that is most literally true, but like most SFF, it’s a theme to be applied to our place and time. The novel’s storytelling style, dreamlike and full of imagery and magic, lends itself ultimately in service to that theme.

Highlights:

• A unique and intriguing future post-apocalypse world.
• A compelling and well explored theme of liminality.
• Strong and vivid, mythic storytelling. A Passion Play.

Reference: Berry, Jedediah. The Naming Song [Tor Books, 2024].

POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I'm just this guy, you know? @princejvstin.

Book Review: Rakesfall by Vajra Chandrasekera

What the heck did I just read (complimentary)?

I've apparently been on a bit of an unreviewable fiction run. I'm not complaining (they've all been stellar) but Rakesfall, the new novel by Vajra Chandrasekera, is not ending this streak on either count.

If you have read his previous novel The Saint of Bright Doors (which Adri covered as part of her roundup here), you might think yourself familiar with the strangeness Chandrasekera puts in his stories - the geography that shapes itself to will and politics, the deftly inexplicable intrusions of the fantastical into the world. But I say to you, having read Rakesfall now, my friend, you have absolutely no idea the depth of the pool into whose shallow end you have merely dipped your toes. The weirdness is off the charts, and he's holding no one's hand this time, except to drag them through the layer by vivid layer of this strange, piecemeal story that slowly coalesces into a sublime whole, without you ever noticing it happening.

The story follows two characters (or perhaps more) whose lives touch each others again and again and again, throughout time and space and branching timelines. Through a sequence of at first what seem like unconnected stories, we see them relate and relate and relate over and again to each other, to the world, and to the substance of their own relationship, until we begin to see that the story has never really just been about them, as if the kind of relationship that transcends lifetimes can ever be a "just". I've seen the book described by some as a series of short stories with a thread of connection between them, but that does no justice to how thoroughly interwoven each part of this novel is, if you're paying attention to look for the connecting threads. They are everywhere, offhand comments and motifs and themes and ideas and names and ghosts all. Some of them even reach further, back to The Saint of Bright Doors, although I would not call this any kind of sequel. What do these characters do? Well, many things. But it is not in their actions that the story really lies, but in their interrelations, and their relationship to the story, to the very idea of stories, instead.

Some books are plot heavy. Some are character driven. Some world-building focussed. Rakesfall is in the rarer category of theme-driven, and the even rarer still selection of theme-driven and also good. And its strength there lies in not letting itself get too bogged down in one single message, to the detriment of all else. Some stories have a single driving ideal at the core of themself, and by focussing on it to the exclusion of all other parts of craft, they wear down the reader so much without rewarding them that the book becomes a lecture instead. Chandrasekera does not have one note here, but a symphony - to say this book cares about one thing is to have missed five others. I'm sure I have missed five different things in my own muddling through. But I found plenty, and each is gently, quietly interwoven with all the others, to be drawn out by someone wanting to look for it. As a story about stories, it understands how crucial a part the reader plays in that dynamic - the need to trust them, to let them find their own way, their own understanding of what is provided, and feel no need to browbeat them into comprehension, to require them to take a single canonical point. The themes I found in it - and enjoyed, well-explored as they were - were around power and oppression, colonialism, autonomy, destiny and inevitability, the role of the player in the story, the power of choices. I am certain I missed some axes of it that overlap into politics I don't know well.  

But the reader does need to be willing to do the work. And that, I think, is going to be the trouble for this book. It is never going to be escapism, or a pacy, distracting, linear read. It's a book whose content, whose meaning, is to be worked for, and it is important to go in willing to put in that bit of effort.

Because if you do? You will absolutely be rewarded.

If nothing else, the prose is delicious. One of the delights of being the age I currently am is that there are now more and more authors writing books who grew up on my internet, on my references, in my generationalect, so to speak. People who use the slang I use, in the tone I use it, whose view of the world is so clearly coloured by the vast, unpoliced, unpatrolled and uncontrolled wilderness that was the internet of the 90s and 00s. I see that in Rakesfall, too, in the way Chandrasekera switches tone and formality, using a downshift into the casual as a subtle irony, or to undercut a mood, like so:

The simile of the two-handled saw is not a parable. It isn't even a story. That it is self-consciously a simile suggests an unseriousness, a little haha hoho, a little lol j/k.

Or the way tone and formatting intrude in the following segment of a quasi-mythical tale within the story:

One day, the king on his throne hears faraway weeping, and he knows it's from the haunted cemetery outside his city, where a seditionist poet impaled for high treason cries, undying or undead, for water. All his soldiers pee themselves a little, so the king calls up his favourite wrestler, biggest face in the city, beloved far and wide as the best good guy who isn't afraid of anything, and the king says, my Beloved Bro, will you Please take this Cup of Water out unto the Dread Cemetery and give it to that Loud Fucker, and Tell him to (a) Pipe down and (b) give Thanks to the generosity of his King? And the wrestler says, Sure Thing my King.

There's a whole essay you could write about the use of capitalisation here, as well as the contrast between that "unto" and the "Loud Fucker"/"Beloved Bro". The way the tone rattles around between high, mythic formality and the numinous and then right down into the most informal and millennial of slang resonates beautifully with how the story is, itself, told, meandering through time and place, through people who are the same but different, from the visceral act of self-flaying in a bathroom to an undying being flying through space. So often, "inconsistent tone" would be a deserved insult, but here, it is anything but - in that inconsistency, it maintains coherence with its own ideas of itself. It could not be the story it is if it were tied down to a single way of speaking and being. This is especially true for tying it in to the characters, who might otherwise be held at arms length from the telling, and who need to be in close, for you to see the echoes of themselves throughout their selves across their time.

Even aside from his tonal choices, the language Chandrasekera uses is consistently well-chosen. He dwells often on the physical, on skin and blood and texture, on the cutting of flesh and the lolling of tongues, and that is so, so necessary in a book whose concept and overarching purpose are so distant from the grit of humanity. It needs tying down, grounding to something familiar, to let us explore that vastness.

But it is not just the prose. Though distant, the characters are well-drawn, and though confusing at first, the plot coalesces into something truly great by the end of the book. Where many stories experience a quickening towards the end, a visible moment where things begin to come together, and where the pace of events kick up a notch - the Eurovision key change moment, if you will - this has none of that. I say "coalesce" because that is exactly what my understanding did, emerging from the mist of the story with delicately paced exactitude. There was no one moment of insight, just a steady, dawning comprehension that lasted over a third of the book, and left the final page closing with a deep sense of satisfaction.

With every compliment I can muster meant - because it's one of my favourite books, and one I would so rarely draw a comparison to - what Rakesfall reminded me most pointedly of is Vellum, by Hal Duncan. Both are stories that use concepts of personal archetypes, a group of souls rattling around time's dice cup, bumping into each other through eternity. Both reject linearity. Both reject categorisation. Both embrace the grit and grime of humanity alongside the sublime, and refute any idea of a mismatch between them. They're not the same book, by any means, but they have some of the same spirit, and must be approached in similar ways. I suspect Rakesfall, as I find Vellum does, would reward each reread with discoveries of new twists, new nuances and new references, and give the reader a different experience every time. And, ultimately, both are books I want to put into people's hands and just say "it's fucking weird, I can't explain it, just trust me... and come back when you're done". They're books to have conversations about. They're books to have conversations with.

Which is, ultimately, why I adore Rakesfall. It's a story that understands stories, and asks the reader to work with it, to reach out and meet it part way, to understand those stories too. To draw from a negative review I saw of it online - it is an experience as much as it is a story - and the beauty of that is that that experience is necessarily a singular beast. My time with it will not be your time, nor my own in a year when I come back to it (as I surely will), pen and paper in hand, ready to make notes. And because it yearns for you to reach out to it, to work with it, because you must do the work to listen and to think, the experience that comes out at the end feels all the more intimate, all the more personal, all the more beautiful.

--

The Math

Highlights: beautiful, winding, tone-shifting prose; a plot that materialises gently out of the ether; immaculate pacing

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10

Reference: Vajra Chandrasekera, Rakesfall, [Tordotcom, 2024]

POSTED BY: Roseanna Pendlebury, the humble servant of a very loud cat. @chloroformtea.bsky.social