WYCCAD

Digging around the web, searching for new authors, ferreting out those indie publishers that aren’t making the bestseller lists — sometimes you come up with gold, sometimes you come up with tin. But, once in a great while, you come up with something more valuable than platinum and more sparkling than emeralds. Sometimes, you discover an author like Steven William Rimmer.

You find a talent that changes the way you look at literature forever.

Rimmer is the amazing author of several books of pagan fiction — Coven, The Order, and, of course, Wyccad. Though Rimmer is not the first to take on this kind of subject matter, no one has ever done it better.

The “castle” hidden in the Scottish Highlands was Anya Donagmore’s home until the death of her mother. Now, Clan MacLeith claim the castle and most of the surrounding land. Anya has some land, her cottage, her lover, and something from the magic of the forest.

Anya has been loved by the lord of the forest. In return, she received strange powers and a deadly enemy. Someone knows more about those gifts than she does. Whoever that person or whatever itis determined to get rid of Anya before she can explore her powers and cause any more trouble.

Only the goddess and Anya’s friends can protect her from the evil that walks the woods.

There is a short snippet of the plot, but nothing I say can prepare you for the experience of actually reading Wyccad. What Rimmer has created is a place so foreign, yet so vividly real, that it is like stepping into another time. The lives of the people in the Highlands are a world apart from the rest of us. Their beliefs, their standard of living, their entire existence, are more like a glimpse of the past than the details of an everyday life.

The people of Wyccad are as primeval as the forest that dominates them. It is an earthy sensuality, a feeling of being a creature of the wilds. The lure of this primitive existence wraps around the reader in the darkness of shadows and the green of growth and the water of life. It is intoxicating.

Wyccad is one of those rare books that has you searching out the author’s other works before you are as much as a third into the novel. The urge to own all of Rimmer’s books is irresistible by the time you finish the story.

Perhaps, the most amazing thing about Wyccad is the promise that this place exists. That this life is going on now, not centuries ago, and not on another planet — the temptation to search for it is so strong, and the knowledge that by finding it we would destroy it, so heartbreaking.

As I said: you’ll never be the same…