The Deep Forest

by Sofía Rhei

$16 (paperback)
$6.95 (e-book)	EPUB	MOBI (unavailable)

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Murky mirrors, deceptive will-o’-the-wisps, dryads who know not what they are, wings born from the sting of punishment, keys that bind bodies, the charm of springs that glow with a false fire, girls sharp with thorns, wishes granted and burdened by the weight of death, people who are anything but human and humans who are not quite people…. Everything has a place in the Deep Forest, a perhaps infinite realm inhabited by all that lives within us without our consent, and where there is nothing more terrifying than a “forever and ever.”

Dark short stories with an uneasy rhythm, dense as the fertile undergrowth that twists into tendrils, wet as the moss on which the dew dwells. Tales woven through fragile intuition and legends wrought with the impulses, guilts, and cravings of which we are scarcely aware. A tarot of twisted intentions and mortal desires.

At the crossroads of poetic and macabre, these fragments of lost lore slither across each page, leaving behind a forest black as ink. Be cautious as you, reader, venture down its uncertain paths. It is there that you will confront all that you fear within yourself.

Advance Praise

Reviews

The past few years have given us quite a few novels and stories reimagining and repurposing classic fairy tales (I was going to say it’s a resurgence, but was there ever a lull?), and for the most part these have involved expanding or embroidering the originals in some way, as if to make them more amenable to our modern notions of narrative. Sofía Rhei’s The Deep Forest takes almost the opposite approach, very nearly atomizing those original materials into tiny seeds and droplets....

Borges comes to mind occasionally with The Deep Forest, especially his later more parable-like work such as Dreamtigers, but there are also occasional echoes of Kafka and of the gnomic stories of poets like W.S. Merwin....The translation here, by Kendal Simmons, convincingly and sometimes hypnotically conveys a very distinctive voice, which (despite a few odd contemporary colloquialisms like ‘‘ginormous’’) evokes the classic rhythms of the old tale-tellers. The Deep Forest may seem a relatively slim collection, but it contains multitudes.  
  —Locus, Gary K. Wolfe, April 2025

ISBN: 978-1-61976-274-9 (13 digit)
Publication Date: Apr 2025
paperback 176 pages