2023 read #114: Drowned Country by Emily Tesh.

Drowned Country by Emily Tesh

157 pages

Published 2020

Read from October 8 to October 9

Rating: 3 out of 5

This is a follow-up to Tesh’s Silver in the Wood, a book I certainly read and enjoyed. But that was almost a year ago, and well over a hundred books ago; I barely remember any of it. I vaguely recall that it was a sweet achillean tale, brushed with green magic, but what transpired or how it ended are lost to me. Which was not the ideal way to begin this book. It assumes you have at least some familiarity with how things shook out in Wood.

So, I gave in and flipped through my copy. Spoilers for Silver in the Wood: Mrs. Silver hunts supernatural threats; her son Henry has followed her into the family business, but has a research bent. Henry buys Greenhollow Hall and meets Tobias, an ancient and canny woodsman who has a deep connection to something monstrous in the wood, something that desires to draw Henry into itself and consume him. When the primordial wickedness is defeated, Tobias goes off with Mrs. Silver to help hunt monsters, while Henry lingers at Greenhollow, now the magic steward of the ancient wood. The lovers part, but Tobias vows to return to Greenhollow someday, to rekindle the people side of himself after all this time.

Now the opening pages of Country make far more sense. Some early spoilers: We open on Henry, two or so years into his forest demigodhood, languishing on the floor of Greenhollow Hall, which rots and grows mushrooms around him. Apparently he and Tobias quarreled at some point and parted on bad terms. Mrs. Silver arrives unexpectedly with crisp commands for Henry to cease sulking and assist her and Tobias on a case. And just like that we’re in Rothport, a gloomy town straggling up a coastal cliff. Henry can feel the memory of his greenwood down below the flooded sea. Tobias, meanwhile, has shaved, and now looks “every inch the well-set-up modern man.” There isn’t time for a proper reunion, because it appears they have a vampire to hunt.

While Drowned Country is solid enough, it feels like the genre has shifted into paranormal procedural; it’s less of a sequel and more like the next installment of, say, a detective serial. Tobias has deflated from an archetypal Green Man, ages old and mysterious, to just another vaguely Victorian monster hunter. With the translation into the new subgenre, some of the sweet magic of Wood has dulled. The result is perfectly serviceable, at times even atmospheric and strange. I enjoyed the character of Maud Lindhurst; I was quite taken with the idea of the drowned country itself. The ending was sweet. But it’s all a step down from what I remember of the original.