Cahan Du-Nahere was once chosen: by a god whose name is no longer spoken, and whose worship has been forbidden in a land where one God has outlawed the others, to reign supreme…

Burdened by a power he is now afraid to use, lest it consume him, he lives Clanless and alone, in the shadow of a forest which holds secrets only he still knows.

But he is being hunted, by those no longer wholly human.

“The great forest called to him in a voice he could not deny… he was drawn to those quiet, dark and lonely places among the vast trees.”

“If you wished to live easily then you must be ready to let the cruelty of the world pass you over, but to do that was also to take the cruelty into yourself. To accept it was to become part of it.”

The world building here is richly phenomenal. Prior fans of Barker will recognise his skill at bringing an entirely new realm to life - it is even more finely honed here. Populated with strange gods and unfamiliar creatures, Barker creates a landscape at once thrillingly alien and achingly human.

The prose is choppy. Barker uses sentence fragments and comma splices. If this annoys you, be forewarned. Neither does he spoon feed. You will have to pick your way through the carefully constructed culture and history as though you were in the forest yourself. But it will reap rich dividends.

If you like the sound of Mythago Wood fighting the Borg… you’ll like this.

Enter the forest.

(As requested, I will publish a review to Goodreads and on Instagram (with art) in the second or third week of June, in preparation for release date on 27 June, unless instructed otherwise.)

Barker's world-building is always excellent, and one of the advantages of a trilogy (possibly the main one tbh) is the amount of time you have to explore the complexities of your imagined world.

The events of this first book are not particularly complicated in themselves. Like most fantasy novels, it's pretty much politics/religion, but the way the information about the world is fed through to the reader means you're always learning more about how things work here. I really enjoy not knowing everything, finding out about the social structures, the food and creatures and plants and the way these things are exploited by the people who live with them, and how some of them endanger those same people.

The scenes in the Wyrdwood are great, we all love a fantasy forest don't we? Of course we do. It's always great when a writer really gives their imagination free rein.

Cahan was Chosen as a child for a particular destiny. He has powerful, disturbing skills, and gaining them was painful on every level. Then the world changed and it seemed he was no longer destined for anything; and his powers have caused him nothing but trouble, so he avoids them. Unfortunately destiny is a tricky thing and you can't run forever, can you. A brilliantly realised, compelling world and a plethora of interesting characters.

Gods of the Wyrd Wood by R.J. Barker is a dark tale about a reluctant hero in a world of gods, both hidden and zealous. It’s a little slow to get going, but by the end the image of a weird and darkly wonderful setting emerges.

Barker’s world building is stellar as usual, painting a world surrounded by a dangerous forest of impossibly large trees, seasons that shift from north to south and back again through warfare and a magical ritual, a unique ecology of flora and fauna, and strange powers that come from an ominous source. It’s a harsh world though, people stretched thin by war and failing crops.

Slightly weaker are the characters, the main POV being a woodsman with a dark past, clanless and separate from society, reluctant to engage with others yet inevitably pulled into their affairs. Then there’s Kirven, a woman in a tenuous position of power trying to balance her aims against wills of the Rai, people twisted by the thing that gives them magic, and her younger offspring who refuses to use their own abilities because to do so means to harm another living thing.

It takes quite some time for the shape of the plot to unfold, in a book that is already a decent length, the reluctant hero staying reluctant for quite some time, practically a shell of a man for much of the book. I did enjoy all the developments, but it was not as compelling as I would have liked.

Overall I enjoyed Gods of the Wyrd Wood, and plan to read more, but readers wanting to try R.J. Barker out for the first time would probably be better served by trying The Bone Ships. Fans of Barker may find this book more emotionally restrained than his other series, but there’s familiar elements too.

Rating: 8/10

The thing about an RJ Barker story is this: you can guarantee each one will be different. His first trilogy centred around political assassins. The second had boneships and pirates. This one is his most original. The world building works on so many levels. In my opinion, it’s an analogy of our own world. His environmental message: protect nature because it will do the same for you. Let me explain what I mean.
As dark fantasy goes, this story’s shadows reach beyond the forest and into the hearts of those whose grip on power cruel and ruthless. The Rai, whose cowls demand to be ‘fed’ by the death of others, are the villains here. They represent a newly-established god and ensure everyone is too frightened to worship anyone else. Fear reigns here. The struggle for survival extends to those who live on the margins of the Wyrd Wood. The forest claims its victims with a plethora of flora and fauna that kill in so many unpleasant ways.
One of these characters is Cahan Du-Nahere. Irritable, impatient and a social outcast, he’s not a sympathetic character at the start. We engage with him as his principles prove he is a good man, a strong warrior. It’s his training, as a child, that has brutalised him. His respect for the forest separates him from everyone else.
It is this respect which leads to the environmental messaging in the story. Cahan tells the locals the forest will tolerate them only if they take what they need to survive and no more. To live within their means. To respect the flora and fauna, which won’t attack unless provoked. Society’s leaders are different. They are obsessed with power and care little for anything beyond their own needs. Now where have we seen that before, eh?
You can always rely on RJ Barker to deliver a bunch of evil, cruel and utterly unpleasant villains. In this story, he does not hold back. They are everywhere. Torture is a common device. The Rai especially have a lovely approach to making people suffer long and agonising deaths. It had me squirming in places. But this all-pervading evil takes many forms and makes for uncomfortable reading sometimes. Towards the end I couldn’t read fast enough to find out who would survive and who would suffer terribly as they died.
Yet there are moments of great tenderness, loyalty and heroism too. This well-maintained balance draws you into the story, immersing you in its drama. It’s hard to put the book down for that reason. For this is a story which will define RJ Barker as a major force in fantasy literature. He promises to be a twenty-first century Tolkein. The messaging, the characters and world building are handled by a master of his craft. It is sublime.