Wildlord

Philip Womack’s new fantasy novel opens in a world that will seem strange and alien to many of his readers: a public school, the morning after the night of the Summer Ball, ‘White Quad Bell’ ringing out into the mid-morning air, pupils staggering back to their rooms after the revelries, black ties undone. The other-worldly air thickens as the story unfolds, and gets considerably darker. Tom is gloomily anticipating spending the long weeks of the summer holidays at school. His parents died in a boating accident and there’s no family, just a distant guardian overseas. So when a strange boy arrives to deliver an even stranger invitation to visit the uncle Tom never knew he had, Tom is determined to go, against his headmaster’s orders and despite a rather frightening run-in with another peculiar visitor.

Mundham Farm, his newly discovered family home, has its own atmosphere of heady timelessness and, somewhat like Tom’s school, is inhabited by people whose way of life seems hardly to have changed in a hundred years. At first Uncle James (Jack) appears welcoming and his companions, beguiling young housekeeper Zita and taciturn handyman Kit, striking with his silver eyes and hair, equally charming; but the more Tom discovers about the house and its inhabitants, the more his understanding shifts. Jack is not the benign uncle he makes himself out to be, he is cruel, corrupt and the two young people are his prisoners. But Jack is holding someone else captive too, one of the Samdhya or Folk, and her people surround the house, effectively imprisoning everyone inside.

The depth of his uncle’s corruption and betrayal is breath-taking and there’s a very real chance that Tom too will be trapped for ever. The sense of danger is as palpable and enveloping as the sense of old magic, the two tightly interwoven, and it’s easy to believe in the Samdhya and lives that stretch and shape nature and even time. Womack is a fine writer who knows just how to spin tales of myth and magic and this is unsettling, original and absorbing reading.

Read our Q&A interview with Philip Womack