Synopsis
There’s something very wrong in Thurstrop Wood.
Mark Warner never noticed it before. He’s there to get away from his life, his ailing mother. Out of his head. Not to think about anything.
Birds sing in the wood. But their rhythms seem wrong somehow. Insects crawl and nest, but not where you’d expect them to.
Something in Thurstrop Wood has noticed him. And now it’s seen him – it doesn’t want to let him go…
Surreally beautiful and uncomfortably visceral, Phengaris’ eco-horrors will stay with you long after the final page.
Review
In the final moments of Phengaris, a character reflects on what has just occurred and finds things to be “so very far from satisfying.” Unfortunately, I had similar thoughts on Phengaris itself.
Reading Anna Orridge’s novella hot on the heels of Todd Keisling’s The Sundowner’s Dance, I couldn’t help but compare the two given the surprising overlap in their subjects. Both deal with life and grief in suburbia and unnatural insectile infestations, with an undercurrent of cosmic horror running beneath it all. Sadly, Phengaris disappoints in almost all the same areas where The Sundowner’s Dance proved so successful.
My biggest hurdle with Phengaris were the characters and their motivations. So much of the latter came across as simply being too oblique, particularly with Aurora, the seldom-seen antagonist who effectively bookends the narrative. Both her and Mark, our central teenage protagonist, do things for little reason beyond the plot requiring them to do so, and they lack any kind of interiority to compel them forward.
I kinda-sorta understand Mark’s motivations for working at uncovering the hidden secrets of Thurstrop Wood. He’s an ornery, standoffish teenager who, like so many other teens the world over, feels like society is beset against him. As a closeted gay man, this is certainly true, and there exists a massive disconnect between Mark and his mother, who is dying of cancer. They mysteries of Thurstrop Wood compel him simply because they are, indeed, mysterious, and digging into them gets him out of the house and gives him something to do.
Aurora, though. Aurora occupies so little narrative space in Phengaris that she never feels like anything other than a second thought. We don’t get to know her at all, or why she does what she does. It seems that part of her plan is to create an army of worker bugs, but to what end? What purpose do they serve? If Orridge has any answers, she’s keeping them to herself.
Too much of what drives the plot of Phengaris is murky and opaque, leaving readers to suss out the hows and whys of it all, with characters acting the way they do for little more reason than just because. While Mark is not quite the cipher Aurora is, he’s not exactly the kind of character that’s easy to get attached to, either. One one hand, Orridge captures the aura of the surly teenager well, but on the other hand I never felt invested in his plight or concerned for his safety. Further, I was never quite convinced that he was anything more than just a character going through the motions in an ill-defined situation. There’s no sense of life to him beyond what’s on the page and he comes across as much too hollow and superficial.
Phenagris feels equally empty as a result. It’s flat, dull, and lifeless. There’s no sense of urgency, even as we’re given the specter of a looming death in Mark’s mother, until the plot suddenly requires a measure of urgency because we’ve hit the climax. Phengaris exists as a solid and intriguing idea, but it never feels fully fleshed out, and I couldn’t help but wonder, by book’s end, if I had missed something. By the time we get a sense of the stakes at play in Thurstrop Wood, it’s too little too late, and we haven’t been given enough reason to care about Mark or Aurora’s success or failure.
To her credit, Orridge does craft a few memorable scenes with some truly creepy and surreal imagery, not to mention a vivid, squirm inducing scene of body horror. They don’t quite make up for all that Phengaris lacks, but they do at least help keep it from being a total wash.
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