A review by terrypaulpearce
The Vorrh by Brian Catling

5.0

This is something special. It's really not quite like anything else. If I was trying to compare, I might say it's the bastard love-child of a threesome between Angela Carter, HP Lovecraft and Jorge Luis Borges, but that doesn't capture it. The prose is sumptuous, but more: it's edgy, and elusive, like the forest it describes. I often dislike the results when form is used to match content too heavily (I hate Toni Morrison's 'Jazz', for instance), but here it works a charm. You feel throughout like you're making your way through a forgetfulness-inducing, charmed, dark, entropic forest, as the characters do just that. And the balance of the whole between little individual stories and myths and arcs, and the larger story, is so well-judged it hurts. This feels as much like a mythology as Tolkien or Lovecraft, but more merged with the familiar. This is our world, but not.