The Hill in the Dark Grove

They referred to the god of the clearing only euphemistically: the Antlered One, the Watchful One, the One-From-Many. Sometimes obliquely by the place it dwelt - the Stones, although by then the only ones still visible were the crumbled, mossy ruins of the fallen chapel. They spoke of it as interchangeable with their familiar Christian God. Or rather, they applied the terms and trappings of their Christianity as a disguise, as though the elder deity had donned the interloper's skin and carried on elsewhere unaltered. Half suspecting them to be wild heathens anyway, the bishops and the abbots of the lowland priories did not intrude. They shivered down there in their draughty chambers, happy not to know and not to wonder what the distant music from the mountains meant.

Carwyn and Rhian are struggling farmers in the north of Wales, both having been born and raised in the same community. However times are hard, crops are failing, and their produce is worth much less than what other generations could fetch at market. With the bailiffs calling and a year of particularly sickly livestock, Carwyn is driven to despair when he loses swathes of pregnant ewes to a blizzard. But his fortune seems to change after rescuing some stranded hikers on his land. He accidentally unearths a mysterious stone figure; half-buried in a long-forgotten thicket. Thinking he might have found historical artifacts worth enough money to pay off his debts, Carwyn begins to excavate the area for more treasures. Some things however were best left buried...

The Hill in the Dark Grove by Liam Higginson is by necessity quite grim. A comparison that comes to mind is The Shining by Stephen King, though Carwyn is a much more empathetic protagonist than Jack Torrence. The quiet stoicism of the farming life is depicted faithfully by the novel, avoiding romanticism of the countryside while still portraying the beauty of the Welsh countryside. Much like nature, the novel really embodies a sense of quiet stillness mixed with sudden eruptions of chaotic violence. Though there are moments of happiness and beauty dotted here and there, this is not a happy story and its quite clear from the first few chapters that it's not going to end well for Carwyn and Rhian.

I valued the portrayal of Carwyn and Rhian's life. Though I have little experience of farming or of living deep in the countryside, the book feels authentic in its telling. I get the impression that Higginson either grew up in farming communities or at least has done his research. There is a knowing vividness in the book's portrayal of the constant cold, the dampness of outside, the farm smells, the sense of embedded dirt that never quite cleans from fingers. Distances, space, time are all captured well, which is important when expecting the reader to invest in the sense of separateness and loneliness from the physical, modern world.

I found myself frustrated to an extent on how easily Carwyn was steered by the ancient, mysterious figure that he dug up. Carwyn's internal monologue made it clear that his honest intentions were being thwarted towards the nefarious ends of otherworldly forces, but by being limited to a change of unspoken thought it felt like a bit of a cop-out at times. I would really have liked to have seen more perhaps of those cosmic or ancient forces, though the beginning of each chapter provides different perspectives of this cursed area through history. The remains that Carwyn eventually spends every waking moment digging up were described in fairly bland and straightforward terms, which made it quite hard as a reader to fathom Carwyn's obsession. Often the telling of the story felt more like static cameras set up than a closer depiction of ancient esoteric influence.

I enjoyed the approach of The Hill in the Dark Grove weaving a semi-obscured story of a farmer's descent into madness thanks to malign influences, using historical events and unnatural occurrences as the means to portray cosmic wrongness, for want of a better way of putting it. The horror existed largely off the page, instead portraying a strong, sensible man being slowly driven to obsessive insanity and violence with much of the violence being implied. For example, a scene of sheep shearing was interrupted by one poor creature's wool sloughing off its body in handfuls of pus and blood, with intense descriptions of buzzing flies and maggots wriggling in deep wounds. These pock marks of horror are ambiguous as much as they are unnerving - caused equally plausibly by a blowfly infection as a curse on the land.

The at-times straightforwardness of the story is offset by Rhian, who is portrayed as the wilder, free spirit of the two. I think her femininity, her rootedness in the real world in comparison to Carwyn's avoidance of reality, and her interactions with other characters away from the farm's influence create a much stronger sense of loss and human cost than had Carwyn been the main and only character. In spite of the inevitability of violence and death, there's a beautiful passage near the end of the novel where Rhian steps out into the fields, reciting half-remembered incantations at the unspeakable, colossal horror that remained just out of sight in the storm, at the very edge of sanity.

I have been the light of a lantern, I have been the radiance of stars, I have been a bridge across the mouths of threescore rivers