How good is Robert Holdstock? The British Fantasy Society calls their annual award for best fantasy the "Robert Holdstock Award." (Not the Tolkein award, mind you), that's how good he is.  I am seriously bummed that he passed away in 2009 because now I can't write him and lavish adoration on him, that's how good he is.  I want to read EVERYTHING he has written, that's how... oh never mind.  I'm not going to read them all immediately.  But I will. The writing style is limpid and willing to be read.  I liked that alot.

Mythago Wood has the elements of many fantasy stories -- a mysterious forest with magical creatures within it. What I think makes it different is how the main character -- Steve -- relates to it like we all do to our own lives -- none of us honestly know what the heck will happen next. We think we do, but in our core, we are not sure. The book captures that mood perfectly in every moment: making breakfast, waiting for the love of one's life to appear, finding strangers at the perimeters of the ground who seem both violent and friendly, making and losing and finding a toy boat, Steve facing down his feral brother Chris: this is a story about the unknown within and without, the qualities of the world and ourselves that we both know  intimately and not at all: we can never be sure, even if everyone knows the story. It makes you wonder how much of your world has sprung out of you.

It's a really wonderful story.  I want to read more from this storyline and his others.

Lessons for Writers: in reaching for the fantastic, don't forget your characters can only make that reach with their own complex, messy, unsure, and somewhat magical senses of their own. Nothing is written in stone.

Learn more about these wonderful books at the Robert Holdstock website.

A small detour from my reading list -- I read the next two books in the Troy series. When I read the first one, Lord of the Silver Bow, I had dismissed the writing style as "summer potboiler," but that was too light a brush. I had already realized the strength of the story was the characters, but the strength of the writing is that everything is perceived through  the characters: neither David nor Stella ever show their hand as authors -- they let their characters do the work, which makes for a very compelling story.

And yet this is deeply their story, so much so that it hurts to think about it. Shield of Thunder  could have easily been named Everyone Dies in the Arms of Their Loved Ones, and David Gemmell died before this was published. His wife Stella finished the last book, Fall of Kings, using his notes, and in the last chapter, when Andromache lights her husband's pyre, it is clear that this was not just the story of Greek heros and heroines, but the authors' story as well.

As I got toward the end, I was reading slower and slower. It was hard to finish this series because it dawned on me that I knew what would happen to Troy -- everyone does -- and that these characters were all going to die. It made me ridiculously greatful for the characters who did survive despite how ridiculous the set-up was. (Friends who became enemies became friends again; against improbable odds, Helikaion and Andromache are reunited with his two sons; his sons are set up as the models for Romulus and Remus; oh and there was more.) We are all heros and heroines in our own stories, and part of that mythology lives forever, and yet all of us die: it is so powerful a theme, and all the more so because the authors were living (and dying) in its unfurling.

Lessons for writing seem so trite after so powerful a tale. Let your characters tell The Story...not a story.

                                                               And Stella Gemmell is still writing. Her "first" book is here.