The Woodwitch (Valancourt 20th Century Classics)

‘A thorough reinvention of the Gothic landscape . . . Gregory’s voice and vision are wholly original.’ – Ramsey Campbell ‘Admirable . . . a queerly intense, hothouse atmosphere.’ – Newsday ‘A finely written and truly creepy novel with a haunting feel for decay and corruption.’ – Books Andrew Pinkney is a young English solicitor’s clerk with boyish good looks and a gentle manner. But he also has a dark side. When his girlfriend Jennifer laughs at his impotence, he lashes out in a violent rage, knocking her unconscious. At the suggestion of his employer, Andrew heads to an isolated cottage in the dark Welsh countryside to take a break and get a grip on himself. In the woods, he discovers the grotesque stinkhorn mushroom, whose phallic shape seems to rise in obscene mockery of his own shortcomings. But the stinkhorn gives him an idea, a way to win Jennifer back. As the seeds of obsession take root in Andrew’s mind, he embarks on a nightmarish quest, with unexpected and horrifying results. Stephen Gregory earned worldwide acclaim with his first novel, The Cormorant (1986), which won the Somerset Maugham Award and was adapted for a BBC film. In The Woodwitch (1988), his second novel, Gregory once again proves himself a master of disturbing and unsettling horror. This edition features a new introduction by Paul Tremblay.

Amazon.com Review

Gregory excels at fierce little novels about city men who move to the country, and discover, to their growing horror, how Nature can act as a mirror for a primitive unmanageable maleness they have never confronted before. This powerfully sensual tale is about a solicitor's clerk who tries to exile himself from his inner violence by fleeing to a tiny cottage in the woods of Welsh Snowdonia. He becomes obsessed with the woodwitch (a fungus shaped like a penis), then with various dead and/or disturbing animals that appear to him, and finally, with the depths of his own sexuality.

From Publishers Weekly

The Woodwitch relates a chilling episode in the life of Andrew Pinkney, a young English lawyer who wants to redeem himself from sexual humiliation. While the ensuing events are often lyrical, more frequently they're macabre. Pinkney is given the run of a deep-woods bungalow in Wales by his boss (who hopes he'll somehow get his wits back), and it's there that he stumbles onto budding fungi he believes will help him bud as well. They're six-inch "stinkhorns," and they haunt him with the power he ascribes them. The plan this not-so-gentle giant devises for his redemption is not for gossamer sensibilities, however, and Pinkney himself is a barely likable lummox. But Gregory writes with the hypnotic power of Poe, and this second novel has chilling implications. Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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