I am still not 100% sure whether I should be calling this a novelette or a novella. I am going by Hugo Award categories, which is novelette from 7,500 to 17,500 words, and novella from 17,500 to 40,000 words. Wikipedia calls this a novella, but they may be basing it on World Fantasy Award categories, which only has short story (up to 10,000 words) and novella (from 10,000 to 40,000 words). If only I had an accurate word count, I would just go with the Hugo category. I had to resign myself to counting words on two pages as samples and then multiplying.

How I hate incomplete information!

Anyway, this story is beautifully written, but I found I enjoyed the "mundane" parts of it far more than the fantastical elements. A man returns from WWII to his family home somewhere in the U.K., only to find that his brother has now taken up the same obsession that his father had before them: mapping and exploring the primeval woods bordering the property.

This was later turned into a full-length novel, and indeed a series. I'm not interested enough to read further, I'm afraid, although I do still appreciate the writing itself.

Oddly, the reminded me very much of the much-later-written first book in Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach trilogy, Annihilation. Same fluctuating "borders" around a mysterious region, characters obsessed and eventually following one another in, same lack of answers.... ( )