Mischief Acts

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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