or their anthology The Green Man: Tales from the Mythic Forest, editors Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling have assembled 15 stories and three poems about the wilderness and its gods and spirits: the Green Man, the Deer Woman, Herne, faerie folk and many more.
Aspects of both the Green Man and the Green Woman appear in Charles De Lint's story, "Somewhere in My Mind There Is a Painting Box." Lily, a budding artist, finds a box full of beautiful paintings in the forest. Then she meets a young man who claims to be Frank Spain, the famous artist who painted them. But Spain disappeared in the forest decades ago. If he isn't dead, he ought to be older than this man. The man claims he has been living in a different world: the world of the Lady of the Wood, found at the end of a lost cave. He yearns to return. Lily desires the man and the new world, despite the dream-warning of her childhood familiar, the Apple Tree Man. And when music emanates mysteriously from a cave, Lily must choose between this world and the Lady's.
Wilderness is not always a far-away forest. Delia Sherman's "Grand Central Park" finds the spirit of nature in the heart of Manhattan, as a lonely teenage girl finds herself lost in the immense park and trapped in a battle of wits with a faerie queen. Michael Cadnum's "Daphne" finds the wild divine in an ancient Greek village, while Midori Snyder's "Charlie's Away" finds it in modern suburbia. Emma Bull's "Joshua Tree" visits a sparse desert forest in Southern California, while Kathe Koja's "Remnants" reveals the mythic forest in urban detritus.
Much wilderness, but little wildness
Modern pagans and goths know him, but few other Americans are familiar with that archaic avatar of the forest, "the Green Man, masked with leaves or disgorging foliage from his mouth." Coeditor Terri Windling's introduction to The Green Man describes this archetype and a fascinating diversity of other nature spirits, from Ireland's Sheela-na-gig to the Swedish wood-wives to the Greek wine-god Dionysus.
The anthology's 18 original fantasies range across the subgenres, from dark to humorous, pastoral to urban, mythological to modern, and magic-realist to revisionist-fairytale. The main characters are less diverse—they're mostly young adults. This combines with the theme for a lot of lost-in-the-woods and coming-of-age stories (don't read this book in one sitting). The settings range from ancient to contemporary, and from metropolis to wasteland, though many of the stories use standard European-style woods and imagery. However, readers will also find Native American myth, a magic-realist jungle, a Southwestern desert, a mighty beanstalk and a manufactured forest.
Ms. Windling's introduction discusses the madness and ecstasy traditionally inspired by nature gods—but the fiction rarely aspires to such extremes. A young woman runs briefly Merlin-mad through a barren New-World Broceliande, and a madwoman creates a forest of her own. But there are no maenads dismembering a man in sexual frenzy—no crazed Conans pursuing the frost giant's daughter—no skull-struck Tarzans reverting to a forest god's innocent savagery. Most of the fiction is temperate, tasteful, polite—it sips chardonnay, eats brie and listens to the Brandenberg Concertos. Of course, there's nothing wrong with that. But after the introduction, readers may wish the stories were swearing, screwing, swilling beer, swallowing 'shrooms and head-banging until the blood and brains pour out their ears.
