Sylvan Dread - by Richard Gavin (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

From the preeminent author of At Fear's Altar and the occult manifesto The Benighted Pathcomes Sylvan Dread, Richard Gavin's fifth collection of preternatural tales. Bound within are thirteen nightmares exploring the Sinister Pastoral, the dominion which prevails at the intersection of mortal reckoning and the primoridum of malevolent Nature. As a meditation on the forces of predation and parasitism, monstrous fecundity and decay, and those hidden folk who occupy the spaces between the branches, Sylvan Dread evokes the primeval wood -- the place where all dreams and nightmares begin. In this isolate copse we witness the excavation of abominations long earthbound, the twilight of the rational, and the forgotten violence of the Dionysian Rite.

Review Quotes

"In medieval times scholars spoke of "Natura naturans" --- Nature reveling in her sheer fecundity and pagan vitality. Like Blackwood and Machen before him, Richard Gavin knows the inhuman yet seductive rapture of the deep woods; he has heard the ancient music on the hills. In his stories of "sylvan dread," his protagonists explore uncanny ravines and hillside clefts, take part in sacrilegious rites, encounter maenads and goatbrides and Lovecraftian horrors. Gavin's prose is always quietly controlled, carefully crafted, but it inexorably leads his men and women into realms of terrifying otherness, where they are changed, changed utterly." --Michael Dirda "This is, indeed, horror, but of a literary, artistic, and subtle kind, requiring as much from the reader as it gives. Yes, there is darkness here, but it is ever shifting and occludes as much as it reveals. It is Pagan, Cosmic, and Weird. And it is wonderful." --'This is Horror') "The great god Pan moves in some very mysterious ways throughout this book, his horrors to perform." --'Metaphysical Circus'--Michael Dirda