Our Guest of Honour Fiona Barnett lives in Edinburgh, but she grew up by the New Forest with stories of Roundheads and Cavaliers, and ancient secrets in the heart of the woods. Besides writing, she works as a proofreader and copy-editor.
Feel free to ask about her favourite Marx brother, and why it is Harpo. Or where does she get her ideas from (’cause there is an answer). Or who is her favourite Swedish crime writer. And all you knittertainers, she is one of you.
She has also made a series of podcasts on the British Civil Wars (Past Tense: British Civil Wars), so not unsurprisingly her first novel, The Dark Between the Trees, is a fascinating folk horror* tale that takes place between two story lines, one in 1643, the other today. In both cases a group of people, soldiers and researchers, go into mysterious Moresby Wood, and things get hairy…
We Finns, Swedes and other Nordic tribes are used to forests and the dark that looms between the trees, even if we have urbanised a fair bit since our grandparents’ time. To Finns, a forest was the safe place to hide, when our former colonial overlords came with their longships to spread their culture and folkhemmet.
Hence we have always been slightly bemused when foreign authors mystify small woodland areas as something incredibly mythic and fantastical. Robert Holdstock did it with Mythago Wood and who could forget the things going bump in the sylvan landscape of Tolkien’s Middle-earth.
The Dark Between Trees takes the fear and feeling of unease and rolls the different storylines together into a fascinating tale that feels like a mixture of Annihilation and Mythago Wood meets Alan Garner and Ursula K Le Guin.
*folk horror? Have you tried Anders Fager or Marko Hautala?
Åcon 13 