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Bright as iron, swift as arrow, strong as oak. I am the land
Yesterday I woke up to the news that Robert Holdstock had died. He was not one of my formative writers, but one I resonated with: I discovered him in college, the summer I was unofficially teaching Latin at Belmont Hill and walked home past the same tiny used book store every day; they had the U.S. paperbacks of Mythago Wood (1984) and Lavondyss (1988) and their covers of masks and granite outcroppings must have caught my eye, because I kept picking them up, reading stray lines of prologue and weighing their weirdness, unsure whether they would be as wild and rough-barked as I was hoping or merely another iteration of crystally Celtic twilight. They were not the latter. My memory tells me that the school year had started by the time I finally brought Mythago Wood home and that I read Lavondyss by falling snow, but perhaps I associate the books so strongly with their presiding seasons that the story has changed inside my head. He wrote one of the three truest autumns I know. I am not pleased there will be no more in his timeless, blood-bronzed, shape-changing forests.
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I think you might like it very much. The newest book in the cycle came out in June and I didn't even know: I am going to find it now.
I know that Greer's work is another of your truest autumns. Who does the third?
Angela Carter in "The Erl-King." I grew up on Ray Bradbury and Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962) is a magnificent evocation of October, but his autumns are more agricultural than wildwood; I turned out to prefer the latter.
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It's the fifth story in her extraordinary collection The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories (1979), which gorgeously, rowdily, darkly by turns retells fairy- and folktales from "Little Red Riding Hood" to "Puss-in-Boots" in a variety of times and settings, late nineteenth-century France, Romania on the eve of World War I, Italy of the commedia and a wood of wolves that exists nowhere but in the words Carter uses to create it. As you can tell, I recommend the book highly.
(Then you should read Robert Holdstock, too. Speaking of songs, Lavondyss has as a supporting character Ralph Vaughan Williams.)
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I'll put out a call for it on interlibrary loan.
Ralph Vaughan Williams? Cool!