The Green Man’s Heir – a modern fantasy rooted in the ancient myths and folklore of the British Isles.

Alongside this fabulous artwork by Ben Baldwin, I thought I’d share some of the inspiration underpinning this new novel from Wizard’s Tower Press.

I grew up with the folklore of the British Isles, by which I mean English, Welsh, Cornish, Irish and Scottish legends, from the Lowlands to the Highlands and Islands. These were stories of giants and witches and dragons and trolls and goblins and boggarts and serpents and will o’the wisps, to name but a few. There were all sorts of fascinating books in the library alongside The Hobbit and the Chronicles of Narnia. Publishers like Pan and Picador offered paperback collections of folktales, retelling the legends of Jack the Giant Killer, Jenny Greenteeth, the Lambton Wyrm and many, many more besides.

I saved up my pocket money and bought some of them; second-hand, dog-eared paperbacks that have somehow vanished over the years through umpteen house moves. That doesn’t matter. The stories have stayed with me and with the benefit of hindsight, I now realise those tales have had a lasting effect on my own writing. Most of them weren’t about heroes and princesses. They were about ordinary boys and girls finding themselves in extraordinary situations, and in very real danger. Getting out of potentially lethal trouble meant using your wits and courage to outfox and defy these mysterious supernatural beings. I still buy books on folklore, from scholarly examinations of the social and psychological underpinnings of stories of witches and fairies, to collections of local legends found in English Heritage, CADW, Heritage Ireland, and National Trust bookshops. I am still fascinated by that intersection between the everyday and the eerie that was part of everyone’s life for centuries.

So I suppose it was inevitable that when I found myself with an idea for an urban fantasy novel, it wasn’t going to be about vampires and werewolves. Those weren’t the creatures that lurked in the shadows outside the window when I was growing up. Similarly, the story wasn’t going to be any sort of urban fantasy, but a tale set in the countryside because that was where these legends took place, amid the forests, caves, rivers, stone circles and barrows that still link these islands to its mysterious past.

How might such ancient eeriness intersect with the modern world? I first started thinking about that when Patricia Bray and Joshua Palmatier invited me to write a story for an anthology they were editing, “The Modern Fae’s Guide to Surviving Humanity”. What would supernatural beings do in the 21st Century if, for instance, a local authority wanted to drive a new road through their grove or watermeadow? That made for a fun story. But the thing about authors is, once we start thinking about something like that, it can be very hard to stop…

Author: Juliet

Juliet E McKenna is a British fantasy author living in the Cotswolds, UK. Loving history, myth and other worlds since she first learned to read, she has written fifteen epic fantasy novels so far. Her debut, The Thief’s Gamble, began The Tales of Einarinn in 1999, followed by The Aldabreshin Compass sequence, The Chronicles of the Lescari Revolution, and The Hadrumal Crisis trilogy. The Green Man’s Heir was her first modern fantasy inspired by British folklore in 2018, and The Green Man’s Quarry in 2023 is the sixth title in this ongoing series. Her 2023 novel The Cleaving is a female-centred retelling of the story of King Arthur, while her shorter stories include forays into dark fantasy, steampunk and science fiction. She promotes SF&Fantasy by reviewing, by blogging on book trade issues, attending conventions and teaching creative writing. She has served as a judge for major genre awards. As J M Alvey, she has written historical murder mysteries set in ancient Greece.

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