Wychwood: 1
After losing her job and her partner in one fell swoop, journalist Elspeth Reeves is back in her mother’s house in the sleepy village of Wilsby-under-Wychwood, wondering where it all went wrong. Then a body is found in the neighbouring Wychwoods: a woman ritually slaughtered, with cryptic symbols scattered around her corpse. Elspeth recognizes these from a local myth of the Carrion King, a Saxon magician who once held a malevolent court deep in the forest., As more murders follow, Elspeth joins her childhood friend DS Peter Shaw to investigate, and the two discover sinister village secrets harking back decades.
- Titan Comics
Corpses in a copse,
A London journalist, Elspeth Reeves, has returned to her childhood home in rural Oxfordshire after the failure of a love affair. She becomes embroiled in a series of ritualistic, myth-driven murders taking place in the local, ancient wood â the Wychwood. She meets her childhood friend Peter, now a policeman investigating the murders, and, sensing a story, begins her own investigation into the case.
Unfortunately, clunky, sixth-form writing, characters thin as leaves, and the authorâs inability to create appropriate mood or tension leave us with something more akin to Midsomer Murders.
The cast is stock; a local hack novelist, an arrogant professor, a mum who makes endless cups of tea, blokey Peter with his comics and Top Gear DVDs. Elspeth has almost nothing to interest the reader; she likes a drink and, erâ¦thatâs your lot; author Mann doesnât even bother to tell us what she looks like. She seems unaffected by the dreadful events taking place almost on her doorstep; after walking in on the ritually mutilated corpse of an elderly woman, Elspeth tells us she has had âa crappy dayâ. Iâm all for cracking on with the story, and I know journalists are meant to be all hardened and world-weary, but this absence of reflection simply distances the reader. Whatâs more Elspeth herself never seems in any danger, part of the overall absence of tension intrinsic to Wychwoodâs one-level murder-discovery of murder/ murder-discovery of murder structure.
Charactersâ actions are strictly limited as they hammily âshrugâ or âgrinâ or ânodâ, often at inappropriate moments, and often three or four times per page. Mann is unafraid of the most fearsome clichés â he actually does use âwhite as a sheetâ, âlike a deer caught in the headlightsâ and âspread like wildfireâ. And he would much rather tell, not show; âElspeth felt an upwelling of anger, frustration and intense sadnessâ; âDazed, emotional and elated, Elspeth leaned back against a treeâ.
The great British folk-horror novel remains to be written.
A Thriller with a Difference,
What if magic was real?,