Paid Post: Book Review--"Drowned Country'
Emily Tesh once again immerses readers in the strange and magical world of Tobias and Henry, two lovers who have to find their way back to one another.
![Drowned Country [Book]](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!wY9-!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ffd7802bb-bb05-4cd8-992e-6a02314c56e5_1500x2400.jpeg "Drowned Country [Book]")
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Warning: Full spoilers for the book follow.
A few weeks ago I wrote about Emily Tesh’s Silver in the Wood and how that little gem of a novella queered Tom Bombadil, one of the most enigmatic yet fascinating of Tolkien’s many creations. For today I want to focus on the sequel, Drowned Country, which shifts the lens to focus on Henry Silver, who has now become the avatar of the woods. He’s about as different from Tobias as it’s possible to be but, at the same time, he has also begun to feel the same sense of temporal displacement that his beloved predecessor felt in his role.
The novella is split between two different time periods. In the present, Henry is called upon by his mother to aid her in rescuing a young woman, Maud, from the clutches of a vampire. In the process of doing so, he ends up reuniting with Tobias and, upon discovering that Maud has dispatched the vampire and is now on a quest to enter the land of the fairies, they go with her on this quest, which is of course fraught with peril. In the past, we see his relationship with Tobias, which comes to an abrupt end when he hides his mother’s summons to Tobias, which leads the latter to believe that he cannot be trusted. These two temporal frames clash as the two men have to find their way back to one another.