I have an old US copy of one of my favourite books as a child: The Dark Is Rising by Susan Cooper. The edition is illustrated by Alan E Cober – dark, fantastical pencil drawings that bring Cooper’s winter world to life. The best of these sketches is of the mythical figure of Herne the Hunter, a weird and warped creature with the antlers of a stag sitting astride a horse. Herne leads his wild hunt through the final pages of the book, a riot of raucous energy that brings the novel to its stunning conclusion. Now Zoe Gilbert, author of a wonderfully strange collection of confected myths in her debut, Folk, has made Herne the hero of her second book.
It is – follow closely here – purportedly an academic collection of writings about Herne, from his 14th-century life as the favoured huntsman of Richard II to his dystopian appearance in the late 21st century. It opens with a convincingly po-faced introduction by a (fictional) professor, who writes of the way that science and enlightenment thought have elbowed the “rascally psychopomp” Herne out of the national consciousness. Now Gilbert’s stories re-accommodate him as the sometimes shadowy representation of a peculiarly British strain of weirdness and wildness.
These tales are as much about place as about their carnivalesque central character. Herne’s death and resurrection as part-man, part-beast was supposed to have happened in the Great North Wood, the forest whose vestiges may still be found in some areas of south London (and in the names of Norwood, Forest Hill and Honor Oak). The book traces the evolution of the city, the diminution of the wood, over the course of centuries, suggesting that echoes of the wild wood may still be heard in the contemporary (and futuristic) streets of Croydon and Penge.
British folk tales have undergone a renaissance in recent years – witness the success of communities such as #FolkloreThursday on Twitter, the presence of folkloric tropes in the work of writers such as Andrew Michael Hurley, Sarah Perry and Sarah Moss, and the rediscovery of classic novels by Susan Cooper, Alan Garner and Robert Holdstock. In Mischief Acts, Gilbert has created a novel that is part of this movement and entirely sui generis. Weaving together prose and poetry, myth and history, the past, present and future, it’s a work of extraordinary ambition, brilliantly realised.
• Mischief Acts by Zoe Gilbert is published by Bloomsbury (£17.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
