Amazon.com Review
Gregory excels at fierce little novels about city men who move to the country, and discover, to their growing horror, how Nature can act as a mirror for a primitive unmanageable maleness they have never confronted before. This powerfully sensual tale is about a solicitor's clerk who tries to exile himself from his inner violence by fleeing to a tiny cottage in the woods of Welsh Snowdonia. He becomes obsessed with the woodwitch (a fungus shaped like a penis), then with various dead and/or disturbing animals that appear to him, and finally, with the depths of his own sexuality.
From Publishers Weekly
The Woodwitch relates a chilling episode in the life of Andrew Pinkney, a young English lawyer who wants to redeem himself from sexual humiliation. While the ensuing events are often lyrical, more frequently they're macabre. Pinkney is given the run of a deep-woods bungalow in Wales by his boss (who hopes he'll somehow get his wits back), and it's there that he stumbles onto budding fungi he believes will help him bud as well. They're six-inch "stinkhorns," and they haunt him with the power he ascribes them. The plan this not-so-gentle giant devises for his redemption is not for gossamer sensibilities, however, and Pinkney himself is a barely likable lummox. But Gregory writes with the hypnotic power of Poe, and this second novel has chilling implications.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.
