By Mark Kirkbride,
Middlesex University
Published by Wild Man of the Woods Press, an imprint of Starship Sloane Publishing Company, Inc., Dark Woods Rising (Round Rock: Wild Man of the Woods Press, 2024) is a collection of explicitly ecohorror and ecoGothic poems. It features cover art by legendary science fiction, horror and fantasy (in particular, ‘weird fantasy’) artist Bob Eggleton (see Figure 1 above), a nine-time winner of the Hugo Award for Best Artist, and is written by the prize-winning sci-fi and fantasy novelist—and now renowned poet—A. J. Dalton (also known as the academic researcher Dr Adam Dalton). Dalton’s works include the Empire of the Saviours (2012-2014) trilogy published by Gollancz, and his poetry has notably appeared in Gothic Nature, Dreams and Nightmares, Star*Line, and Radon Journal. His work is both creative and academic in its consideration of the ‘darker side of nature’, and the poems collected in Dark Woods Rising exemplify particular critical themes and motifs found within the ecoGothic and ecohorror traditions—exploring, for example, well-known tropes such as Nature’s revenge, as well as examining the ‘expulsion from paradise’ into the wilderness (Parker, 2020: p. 1), and playing host to a wealth of familiar creatures and monsters to boot.
Fears of the titular ‘Dark Woods’ are intuitively inscribed in childhood. For many of us, that fear is passed down as part of a shared cultural heritage from a time when Europe was clothed in forest but lives on as ongoing literary tradition. In the Anthropocene, humankind (or at least a proportion of it) now fears both for the forest, in a time of mass environmental destruction, and yet continues to have some trepidation around the woods themselves. Both sets of fears are encapsulated in the genre designation ‘ecoGothic’. Dalton’s collection encompasses fantasy, horror, sci-fi and the weird. With themed sections titled ‘Hidden Places’, ‘Hidden Monsters’, ‘Hidden Spaces’, ‘Hidden Selves’, ‘Dark Skies’, ‘Dark Stars’, ‘Dark Times’ and ‘Dark Tidings’, darkness and concealment predominate. Yet for all the variety, as the collection’s title clearly indicates, it is the Gothic forest that is the main setting. As Lisa Kröger (2013) notes in relation to Gothic novels of the eighteenth century, ‘[w]hile much is made about Gothic edifices, such as the ancient estate or the crumbling castle, the environment, most often seen in the Gothic forest, plays just as integral a role’ (p. 35). Just as the title Dark Woods Rising has been selected deliberately to point to wider themes including an awareness of our origins as forest dwellers to acute consciousness about the threat to such environments from our rampant expansion, so, in this very self-aware collection, the titles of individual poems, such as ‘Ecogothic’ and ‘Ecohorror’, denote both academic rigour and intent, responding to traditional academic research, while also constituting practice-based research, addressing, as they do, genres head on.
In ‘Ecogothic’, a band of soldiers, or brigands, has embarked on a doomed mission to demand ‘the return of some loved one’ in a prisoner exchange, only leading to the isolation of the group and immense suffering:
‘And so contagion was let loose, corrupting pustules
and throats choking off our cries, my rictus hand
barely able to hold: this pen, to scrawl our confession’ (p. 23).
Enjambement helps set the locale, at ‘the edge / of the world’ (Ibid), but, as befits a poem called ‘Ecogothic’, it is the woods that Dalton references first. Given that the wind ‘groaned’, balefully ‘angered’, and the wood creaked ‘as if in protest’ (Ibid), the setting is plainly more than sympathetic background for the band’s crimes along the way. Nature itself has now turned on them. Indeed, the ’Rising’ of the collection’s title is as deliberate as the statement of its main setting.
The poem ‘Ecohorror’ once again denotes that the poet is explicitly engaging with a specific genre, with research directly influencing poetic output and art and the academe both nourishing one another. As Brian Merchant’s colourful definition of the genre captures, ‘man tampers with nature—or worse, ruins nature—and nature kick’s man’s ass’ (Merchant, 2012), the revenge of the natural world being a key trope of this genre as a source of the horror. Another familiar archetype of the genre is the Eve-like female outcast, and Dalton’s poem features both Nature’s revenge and this ‘she-devil in the wilderness’ (Parker, 2020: p. 117) or witch-like character. The persona of the poem, a woman, has exiled herself to a ‘slurping swamp’ that, extracting revenge for her, will ‘waylay, sink and drown’ her enemies after they have, we assume unjustly, accused her of being a witch. Yet, somewhat undermining our initial assumption of innocence, she will ‘cackle with glee’ (Dalton, 2024: p. 3).
The collection features many other recognisable denizens of the forest and woods, and male energies in addition to female energies. Often representing our fears of the forest personified, in the form of familiar but no less frightening monsters, these include the demonised or zoomorphised angry ‘dark’ male, whether goblin or troll. In ‘Troll Territory’, a father issues repeated warnings about the danger posed by Dovregubben and his kind to a son for whom it is ‘just a fantasy […] from an elder weak in arm and mind’ (p. 16) and, in one of many ambiguous endings, we are left wondering who is right. While titles in this collection clearly set expectations that are then met in full, endings often make us question what we have read, providing another layer or alternative reading to the mini-narratives they contain.
The poems are by no means all despairing, however, as they offer us refreshing moments of dry humour or ironic amusement; although the reader might sometimes wonder if it is gallows’ humour and perhaps be unsure whether to laugh or cry. The persona of ‘Beneath’ is convinced that what lurks under the bridge is a troll when in its vicinity yet ‘in the light’ can ‘chuckle brightly’ and dismiss the experience as ‘childish imagination’ (p. 17). This poem too therefore has it both ways as a complex playing with emotion is enacted. The chuckle expresses relief but also residual fear, thereby encapsulating our ambiguous relationship to the forest and its environs that continues into the Anthropocene. The reaction also captures our alienation from the natural, for the Scandinavian troll is of course a protector of the environment, adding an ecocritical dimension to a poem ultimately about our ‘contemporary confusion’ and ‘disorientation’ (p. 18).
The poems in this collection not only interrelate according to placement and contiguity, with one poem providing the context for the next, but also between and across sections with poems engaged in a debate with one another, often across genres. The titles of individual poems, however, such as the aforementioned ‘Ecogothic’ and ‘Ecohorror’, foreground the poet’s primary focus in a collection conscious of its purview and provenance. Research has responded to the literature; here, literature responds to the research. This is a poet who has conducted extensive research into genre fiction and fantasy in particular, both theory-led and practice-based, and who now applies that knowledge to the production of poetry. As mentioned, and perhaps only to be expected given the author’s background as a successful novelist, the poems possess a strong narrative component. This means that the reader without any specific prior knowledge about the above genres can enjoy the texts as both poems and mini-stories, while the more academic or specialist reader can appreciate a creative reinterpretation of familiar themes, motifs, tropes and traditions in poetic form. In short, I would highly recommend this intriguing and lively collection to both academics and fans of speculative poetry (horror, fantasy, sci-fi and the weird) alike.
Author Biography
Mark Kirkbride is a visiting lecturer on the Creative Writing and Journalism BA at Middlesex University. He has also worked as an Arts and Literature Tutor at Royal Holloway, University of London. His research focuses on literary genres and representations of mental health in creative writing and literature. He has been published in Religion in Fantasy and Science Fiction (Academia Lunare, 2023), Inspire – Exciting Ways of Teaching Creative Writing (Goldsmiths, University of London, 2020) and in the British Science Fiction Association’s journal, Focus 71 (autumn 2020) and Focus 75 (autumn 2022). He is also a genre novelist, with works including Game Changers of the Apocalypse (Crossroad Press, 2022), which was a semi-finalist in the Kindle Book Awards when originally published by Omnium Gatherum Media in 2019, and The Plot Against Heaven (Crossroad Press, 2022). https://markkirkbride.com/
Bibliography
Dalton, A. J. (2024) Dark Woods Rising. Round Rock, Wild Man of the Woods Press.
Kröger, L. (2013) Panic, paranoia and pathos: ecocriticism in the eighteenth-century Gothic novel. In: Smith, A. & Hughes, W. (eds.) Ecogothic. Manchester, Manchester University Press, pp. 34-51.
Merchant, B. (2012) The Evolution of Eco-Horror, from Godzilla to Global Warming. Vice.
Available from: https://www.vice.com/en/article/the-evolution-of-eco-horror-from- godzilla-to-global-warming/ [Accessed: 4th March 2025].
Parker, E. (2020) The Forest and the EcoGothic: The Deep Dark Woods in the Popular
Imagination. Cham, Palgrave Macmillan.