It's been a very long time since I read Mythago Wood, so I'm glad I reread it before plunging into any of the other books in the Mythago series.

Mythago wood is at once a ghost story, gritty fairy tale, love story, legend, and epic fantasy. For a very long time it's very cozy, only occupying one house and a very few characters, but with a very haunting presence of Ryhope Forest, a small woodland that is left over from before the encroachment of human beings in Britain. The wood is haunted, but not by ghosts so much as legends inherited by modern humanity from the days of the previous ice-age to more recent times. These are dangerous legends, none of them cute or sweet-smelling. Even the most beautiful and delicate of them could easily kill a modern man with her spear. You don't want most of them to pay you a visit, but if you live on the edge of this woodland, they will come, drawn from your own racial memory from times of great need.

I can't do a good synopsis of this book, but I can say that it's one of my favorite to be categorized as fantasy. It feels more like... something real? Much of R. Holdstock's book seems to be grounded in anthropological studies of legendary figures, but also in the reality of what people would really be like in the Medieval times or even earlier. You get a sense not of Narnia, but of primitive people being plucked from hundreds or thousands of years ago, and set loose in a wood that should not have wild boars or wolves roaming through it, or a mighty river that enters and exits the forest as a trickling stream. Yet it does, and it's not hard to believe it, to be fearful of it, but also to be fascinated by it, by what hard reality those legendary figures were molded from. Reading this story feels like something real, something I could thankfully experience vicariously through words on a page.