Meanwhile, the man whom Rob has rescued and who calls himself Vetch emerges as a figure who appears in Welsh folklore under a different name, a personage who has supped from the cauldron of inspiration and become a shape-shifting magician and poet.

When we realise that Chloe’s name derives from Greek χλόη, meaning spring foliage or greenery, and that the place in which she’s apparently incarcerated is called Annwn, the Welsh Otherworld often located below the earth’s surface, we start to wonder whether she is actually more a willing prisoner than one forced against her will. In her comatose state she believes she’s being kept prisoner in a series of castles or caers ( caerau in Welsh), menaced by a forest of encroaching trees. For a few months now her family are distraught, resorting to displacement activities – the father and mother being largely absent at work, and her brother Robert losing himself in his art – all observed by Mac, a concerned Catholic priest.īut then things come to a head when Rob becomes a paid volunteer on a nearby hush-hush archaeological dig and, almost simultaneously, is drawn willy-nilly into a New Age ritual at the Avebury stone circle, destined to help what seems to be a shape-shifting druid escape from a pursuer.Īs we watch things play out in the mundane world of the chalk downs of southern Britain we start to become aware of a voice breaking into the narrative, the voice of somebody who ostensibly is lying in a coma, a state where archetypes and monsters freely roam the voice in fact of a sleeping beauty surrounded by dark woods.Īlthough we might assume that Rob is the principal protagonist in Darkhenge it turns out that Chloe is the real mover and shaker. On: Gorse.Ĭhloe, a deeply troubled teenager living in the shadow of her brother, a talented artist, is in hospital in a coma after a horse-riding accident on the Marlborough Downs. ‘No one,’ she said firmly, ‘treats me like a little girl.

Darkhenge by Catherine Fisher