LoveReading Says
LoveReading Says
I have been obsessed with the mythical figure of Herne the Hunter since I first read John Masefield’s ‘The Box of Delights’ at a very young age. This shapeshifting, trickster shadow spirit of the English Wildwood has haunted the deepest recesses of my subconscious ever since. Every later encounter with Herne and his lookalikes and doppelgangers, in Susan Cooper’s ‘The Dark is Rising’, in the novels Alan Garner, in The Merry Wives of Windsor, in the early ‘80s TV series ‘Robin of Sherwood’, in Robert Holdstock’s ‘Mythago Wood’ and other incarnations provided fresh fuel for this fascination.
Zoe Gilbert’s extraordinary, hugely ambitious reworking of English myth and folklore weaves the figure of Herne into the history of The Great North Wood, the oak forest which originally covered most of southeast London, chronicling its gradual disappearance as the ever-expanding city chokes and devours its ancient wild spaces, revealing the dark and timeless undercurrents that lie beneath the fragile English psyche.
Herne adopts multiple guises and voices as he is pursued through time and space by his vengeful creator, his story embodying hidden captured in a daring and dazzling series of stories, rhymes, fables and unreliable pseudohistory.
Audacious and utterly beguiling, Mischief Acts is experimental fiction at its best and most entertaining, one of those incredibly rare novels that succeeds in ambition to ‘re-enchant the world’.
Selected by Stephen Ellcock, Our Spring 2023 Guest Editor. Click here to read the full Guest Editor Piece.
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Mischief Acts Synopsis
Herne the hunter, mischief-maker, spirit of the forest, leader of the wild hunt, hurtles through the centuries pursued by his creator.
A shapeshifter, Herne dons many guises as he slips and ripples through time - at candlelit Twelfth Night revels, at the spectacular burning of the Crystal Palace, at an acid-laced Sixties party. Wherever he goes, transgression, debauch and enchantment always follow in his wake.
But as the forest is increasingly encroached upon by urban sprawl and gentrification, and the world slides into crisis, Herne must find a way to survive - or exact his revenge.
With its intoxicating, chameleonic voice and boundless imagination, Mischief Acts is British folklore as you've never read it before: dangerous, sexy, troubling, daring, savage, an exhilarating race through time and space, weaving together the ancient and the contemporary.
About This Edition
ISBN: |
9781526628800 |
Publication date: |
17th March 2022 |
Author: |
Zoe Gilbert |
Publisher: |
Bloomsbury Circus |
Format: |
Hardback |
Primary Genre |
Historical Fiction
|
Press Reviews
Zoe Gilbert Press Reviews
'A work of extraordinary ambition, brilliantly realised' OBSERVER
'A mesmerising journey down the byways of English folklore' MAIL ON SUNDAY
'Verbally dextrous, inventive, and hugely entertaining' THE TIMES
'A dark-dazzling archive of enchantments, pursuit, and desire' ELEY WILLIAMS
'This is the most adventurous, stylistically magnificent thing I've read for years. Nobody does fantasy like Zoe Gilbert' NATASHA PULLEY
'Mischief Acts is brimming with magic ... The story of Herne, like the forest itself, transforms, entangles and enchants' LUCY WOOD
'A dazzling new take on an ancient myth, reminding us of the wildness within. I adored it' KERRY ANDREW
'Superb. A work of shimmering allure' IRENOSEN OKOJIE