Picador
Carwyn and Rhian – the last in a long line of
sheep farmers – are living out a brutal year on their hillside farm,
deep in the mountains of North Wales.
When Carwyn discovers a
buried prehistoric ruin in one of the fields on their land, his
curiosity quickly descends into obsession. His wife, Rhian, meanwhile,
is confronted with the growing realization that the man with whom she
shares her life and home is becoming a frightening stranger.
As
the harsh winter closes in, Rhian finds herself alone with her
increasingly unrecognizable husband, and the mountains, and the looming
megalithic stones.
Treading similar ground to Andrew Mihael Hurley, but relocated to North Wales, Liam Higginson's debut novel is a folk horror descent into the unknown depths, historical, geographical and mythological, of the area.
On their farm in the Eryri National Park (formerly known as Snowdonia) Carwyn discovers an ancient burial mound where, with visions of riches, he begins to amateur archeologise his way into it. As he becomes increasingly obsessed it's left to Rhian to take care of the farm and deal with his increasingly unhinged behaviour. Beyond this, the wider story of the mound unfolds in snatches alongside glimpses of the couple's past slowly providing an understanding of how they came to be where they are.
It's a nicely written piece, delicately paced with a satisfying, if maybe predictable, conclusion and whilst Higginson perhaps doesn't quite yet have Hurley's poised lyricism there's a real storyteller at work here teasing out the descent into both man and mountain and perfectly situating each in the existence of the other. Higginson is careful to provide a definite sense of place that's only intermittently broken when the couple, who, as North Wales hill farmers, I assumed to be pretty much always speaking in Welsh, suddenly, drop actual Welsh words and phrases into their dialogue which yanked me out of the storyworld every time. I get what he was trying to do with it but, for me, it seemed anomalous.
It's an impressive debut, grounded, humane and yet deliciously eerie, and I'm very much looking forward to seeing what Higginson does next.
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