[davem]

This, http://robertholdstock.com/articles/...le-afterwards/ from his own site, is a fascinating discussion of his creation.

George Huxley indulges in my own passion for attempting to understand the unknowable, for discovering the ‘forgotten’, the legends, the heroes, the tales that never made it into the written record: their power, their prose, their sense of wonder, all dying with the last, ancient voice that spoke of them. Huxley finds traces of those lost legends. And like the author, he becomes obsessed with them.

Many writers create their own lands, their own worlds, their own story sequences. Asked, in a radio interview as I was writing the first book, whether I was inclined to do the same thing, my answer was ‘No’. But afterwards it occurred to me that I had the possibility of inventing new mythologies, new legends, and juxtaposing them with the tales and characters with which we are already familiar. The wood itself, then, was the world, and there could be many characters from our own world who, in their own way, might untangle the mysteries of that Unknown Region....

“I had that sense of recognition. Here was something which I had known all my life, only I didn’t know it.”

....

“I dream in my dream all the dreams of the other dreamers,
And I become the other dreamers.”

For myself, I have been ‘dreaming’ Ryhope Wood for more than twenty years, now. I live at its edge, half asleep in reality. Then I hear the sounding of a horn, or the howling of a hound. Someone or some thing steps out from the edge of the wood, and beckons to me. And once again, it’s time to wake up. Time to journey.

And on that journey I wish him well.