Win The Deepest Furrow Curated By Jonathan Wood File Ebook

an entrancing start to this journey, I dare not read more in case it breaks the spell

The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.

Above is one of its observations at the time of the review,

One of many reviews of THIS Jonathan Wood posted elsewhere under my name, As is always the case with Mount Abraxas Press, this artifact is beautiful, The woodcut cover by sitelinkMatus Durcik is deceptively quaint and rustic, And while the narrator of The Deepest Furrow seeks solace in a return to the rustic, he finds it anything but quaint.
Voluntarily leaving the drudgery of urban officelabor, with its demeaning social structure and seemingly shallow inhabitants, the narrator abandons civilization for the simplicity of life "among the peasants" so to speak.
He finds that the simple life isn't so simple especially when he interacts with the children of the rural folk and that a return to the soil is, well, precisely that.


This is the second Jonathan Wood book I've read, I found this one a bit more accessible than sitelinkThe Haunted Sleep, Wood's facility with poesis is evident here, with just enough of an experimental edge to add zest, but not so much as to overwhelm.
The subject matter kept things downtoearth at times, literally, and the narrator's voice, that of a midlevel officeworker, felt correct.


One must note the strong existential streak herein, as noted in my review of The Haunted Sleep.
It is a prominent part of the fiction, though this is more of a workingman's existentialism, sitelinkmore Kierkegaard than Nietzsche.
In the end, though, does it really even matter I think Wood would argue "no", I think Jonathan Wood's prose style is growing on me, I know in the past, he has published some wonderful pieces often by Ex Occ, and despite my efforts and despite the beauty of his writing, I have at times had trouble connecting with his works, even having trouble following the narrative.
Some of his pieces can be a bit opaque at times,

Deepest Furrow was outstanding though, Having lived in the urban environment much of my life, I was rather sympathetic with some of the sentiments being expressed in this piece about the soul crushing banalities and injustices of living the "rat race" in a city life.
But by the end I think it was pretty clear that there was a certain equal level of oppressiveness and caprice associated with living a more rural/natural lifestyle.


Folk Horror.

Were we to hold up a mirror to the genre, we might witness it reemerging from recent antiquity, rising from out of the impervious mists of time like one of the ancient gods so often invoked in its narratives.
Recent films such as 'A Field in England', in conjunction with the sterling efforts of all involved with the Folk Horror Revival website, have helped to restore Folk Horror to a level of prevalence not seen since the genres modern heyday of thes.
Were all at least broadly familiar with the standard tropes of the genre: elaborate rituals, ancient preChristian deities, wild landscapes, and occult lore.
But at its heart, Folk Horror is about people, Its about how people invoke the gods of the past how people interact with untameable wilderness how people affect the natural world.
No matter how outlandish or unfamiliar the subject matter, Folk Horror is bound to witness it through the eyes of humanity.


So what might happen if a character with a Ligottian perspective on the world were to be thrust into a Folk Horror narrative In a godless universe, wholly devoid of meaning, can Folk Horror even truly function

This question forms the basis of Jonathan Wood's superlative novella, and if 'The Deepest Furrow' is any indicator then the answer is yes, it most certainly can perhaps even more effectively than it ever has before.
There are no rural idylls to be discovered here, only another form of meaningless existence, the nihilism of the city contrasted with the nihilism of the countryside.
All living creatures exist purely by chance, the consciousness of humanity enough only to endow us with the knowledge that life is both unwarranted and undesirable.
Suffering dominates the expanse of moments separating birth from death, and there are no Gods, no supernatural others, coming to save us from ourselves.
Humanity and Mother Nature here come face to face, and both are found wanting,

'The Deepest Furrow' is redolent with the ruins of existence, Filth encrusts the world and we are all destined to drown beneath its sordid embrace, Believe what you will, it makes no difference in the end, The subtleties of a mind in the process of disintegration a very plain, usual mind, which we saw every day in our daily lives, but in the moving from its usual compass to new and unexpected directions a recurring theme in literature, indeed.
This intimate, dark journey is at the foundation of much of Edgar Allan Poe's fiction, for example, with a kind of character that deliberately destroy its means of existence, driven by a vague feeling of horror at normality that the author called perversity.
In most of the fiction made after Poe, which traces these uncertain steps, some type of psychological penetration, of exploratory diving into the sick conscience is sought even Dostoyevsky chose this direction.
But there is another way the dazzle in the face of disintegration, There are, therefore, works that choose to contemplate the complex processes of the mind on the verge of extinction to obtain a certain degree of ecstasy the investigation becomes a poetic, sacred rumor.
So, it was with Lautréamont, with the surrealists, with Alain RobbeGrillet and it is, likewise, with this spectacular fiction creator, Jonathan Wood.


For the entirety of the review: sitelink weebly. com/blog/t The story of one who wanted to escape but has to realize the difference between romantic projection and the actual dirt under his feet and fingernails.
Pleasantly surprised by the lack of idealizing nostalgia, An intriguingly weird story of nature and humanity finely bound in an artful volume, A nice read that will sit just as nice on a collector's bookshelf, A FOLK HORROR MASTERPIECE FROM MOUNT ABRAXAS PRESS,

Original Woodcut Illustrations by Matúš Ďurčík,

The entire book is printed on dark deep blue paper,



Set in the interwar years somewhere in Europe, an intellectual city dweller, compelled by a variety of conflicting circumstances and rebelling against modernism, seeks to captive enlightenment and Life's purpose in the countryside and the rural life propelling himself into this aspiration through an amplified philosophical affinity with Nature nurtured quietly for years from childhood through books and pictures and walks.
He seeks out

isolated communities, to settle in and to therefore be able to successfully reject the modern world.
He wants to find himself,

He comes, after much travelling to an isolated and insular old settlement in a deep valley, inhabited by rural folk, who after much fear, take him into their community and absorb him into their ways.
The community is a thorned thicket, imbued with a private culture dependent and reinforced by the ancestral echoes of its past and present, that shuns any notion of the future.
It has at its centre a deep sense of loyalty to Nature, to the beasts of the field and the diurnal cycle of the farming that they do, with humanity indistinguishable from Landscape.


What begins as a bucolic and romanticized absorption into the community then becomes a very cruel 'rites of passage' as modern identity is reversed and reverted to notions crude and powerful of deep ruralism and xenophobia where the community itself in all its gnarled and interbred state define their way of living as if each day was a different picture, a tale, a cruel fable, where wisdom and illumination manifests through aberration and malignancy.
There are also cruel twists with certain aspects of Nature defined as the migrant, the unwelcome, the lesser.


There is a shadow subtext where parts of the distant rural landscape are being given over to the construction of certain camps and where the air on the horizon is thick with ancient prejudices and its resultant human debasement.


But this is not the end of it,

I will say no more to avoid revealing any surprises, The text is emboldened with strong poetic descriptions of Nature in all its manifestations, where the rural idyll turns in on itself.
It is a celebration of the unstoppable raw Life intensity of Nature and The Olde Wayes and also a funeral mass for the notion of community and the individual, ploughed deep into the soil.


But that is not the end of it,
But that is not the end of
But that is not the end
But that is not the
But that is not
But that is
But that
But

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