I finished reading this close to two weeks ago and I'm only writing a review now. This is emblematic of my frustration with The Vorrh, a book that came with a lot of buzz in some circles and, in the first 80 or so pages, really established something I thought I was falling in love with.
This is, at its heart, a sort of Weird fantasy tale. There's a small town bordering a forest that is believed to be magical or haunted or dangerous or some combination of all of those things. One man seeks to explore the Vorrh, others are trying to stop him, and just the strange character of the town in general ends up dominating everything.
It's a book that suffers from the same thing we see a lot of the New Weird doing (even if this is not explicitly categorized as such), in that the setting and mood of the book overwhelmingly take precedence over the plot, and what ends up happening is that the construction of the story takes a back seat over the worldbuilding aspects. What was constructed deserved a better tale to go with it, and it became repeatedly difficult to care about anything that was going on.
Just a definite disappointment. Some readers might find some interesting stuff here, and if you're into significant worldbuilding this might be one to look up, but otherwise...
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