I’m pleased to see from Wyrd Britain that Alan Garner is still writing, up on the Alderley Edge…

“I had kind of assumed that Garner had retired from writing but this little 152-page novella [Treacle Walker, October 2021] shows him to be a writer still right at the top of his idiosyncratic game.”

“Told in a delightful, poetic lilt we find Joe trapped in a fairy tale adventure as a folkloric cavalcade of fantastic phenomena both vex and aid him as he tries to quietly reads his comic. […] a darkly funny tale of another world, a mythic world filled with old lore, a world of deep, dark woods and the mischievous creatures that live within them”.

Sounds great, and more-or-less local too. Though, on my arriving at Amazon, my excitement was immediately deflated by gushing praise from the leftist Guardian and far-left New Statesman. But thankfully that’s probably just the skew from the publisher, who seems to have had it reviewed in remarkably few places. If you’re not a leftist or a subscriber to the nominally-conservative Telegraph (one glowing review there, paywalled) you wouldn’t know it existed. I certain didn’t. Searches suggest that America is utterly oblivious, too, other than a blog post by Murray Ewing (not linked here, due to massive spoilers). Though perhaps all you need these days is a tweet from Neil Gaiman and some TikTok, and I’m behind the times in expecting to find lots of proper reviews in magazines and newspapers — and for what may be the last book of a great writer. Well… it’ll definitely be in the next Digital Art Live, anyway.