Liz Bourke Reviews The Butcher of the Forest by Premee Mohamed

The Butcher of the Forest, Premee Mohamed (Tordotcom 978-1-250-88178-6, $18.99, 160pp, tp) February 2024. Cover by Andrew Davis.

It seems to me that I’ve read more books that have to do with weird forests over the last couple of years (some kind of Otherness, other land, or strange and inimical powers deep within the woods) than I have in a long while: Hannah Whitten’s fantasy-romance For the Wolf comes to mind, as do Emily Tesh’s Silver in the Wood and Drowned Country. (Though the sense that such books have increased in number might be a bias of my attention.) R.J. Barker’s Gods of the Wyrdwood is even more directly comparable to Premee Mohamed’s The Butcher of the Forest, for it too is a novel in which the retrieval of a child or children from the powers of a wood, and the tyranny of powers outside the wood, play a significant role. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Premee Mohamed’s The Butcher of the Forest is a precise and atmospheric novella plumbing the depths of an old and strange set of woods, a novella that parallels and contrasts the mundane power of an ordinary tyrant as with the weirdling powers in the deep forest.

The impenetrability and the strangeness of the deep woods, their existence as a place outside of civilisation, a place where the borders between the human world and a world of inhuman powers grow fuzzy, is an old, old trope in literature and folklore. The forest is the abode of bandits and of monsters: It is outside civilised laws, and the law of might prevails.

Veris Thorn lives in a village near the woods. The south woods are tame. The north woods are not: Inside them is another wood, not a natural wood but a place of strangeness and terror from which few have ever returned. The north woods eat chil­dren. Veris is the only one in living memory to have entered the woods and retrieved a lost child. The child died later, but she did bring the child out first.

Veris’s village is ruled by a tyrant who conquered the land bloodily and settled in to rule it. Many of Veris’s relatives have died on account of his actions, including, in her youth, her mother and her father. The tyrant, too, operates on the law of might: His strength, and the strength of his fol­lowers, allows him to do anything he wishes to the ordinary people whom he rules.

The tyrant’s two young children have gone into the forest. He demands that Veris bring them back. If she doesn’t, her remaining family – indeed, her entire village, will pay a terrible price. Veris knows she only has a day, a mere 24 hours, before the children are lost to the forest forever. Even with her knowledge and the little tricks that won her free last time, it is unlikely she can recover the children in time.

Veris isn’t exactly eager to set out to rescue the children of a monster – children who will likely grow up to be monsters themselves – from what monsters lie in the woods. But the children are, after all, children. And Veris is a woman and not a monster herself.

Mohamed’s forest is an eerie, alien place, hauntingly atmospheric, and never to be trusted. Mohamed is often elliptical about its dangers and its horrors, her lucid prose conveying more by Veris’s reaction to her encounters than by plain description, though the description is frequently elegant. The forest contains terrible things, and in the course of Veris’s journey the reader also learns some terrible things about people and Veris’s past. Is anyone innocent? The powers within the forest and those outside it, as well as the victims and the victimisers, are set in contrast and in comparison: power with which you cannot negotiate, though you might take a deal and count yourself lucky the price is one you can in fact pay. Mohamed is perhaps a little heavy-handed in the parallels between the arbitrary powers here, but it has the benefit of making her major thematic argument very visible.

This is not horror, not quite. Or perhaps it avoids being what I see as horror only by the presence of hope that is never quite denied, and successes that, while partial, are never more painful than complete failure. The heart of the story is Veris, her complications, and her privacy about her griefs, the complex tension between her desire to help the children and her reluctance to trade away more of herself than she must. Some griefs are too terrible to bear, much less share.

The Butcher of the Forest is a compelling and effective story. It has layers, and depth, and feeling. I recommend it, but it’s definitely a fairly dark and discomfiting sort of fantasy.

This review and more like it in the December and January 2023 issue of Locus.

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