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language: Welsh
country: UK
year: 2022
form: short fiction
genre(s): fantasy, sci-fi, horror
dates read: 14.5.26-17.5.26
Peredur Glyn’s Pumed Gainc y Mabinogi is a collection of loosely linked — shared setting / world-building elements, but not shared characters — cosmic horror short fiction, drawing, as the title implies, on the stories that make up the Four Branches of the Mabinogi, as well as some adjacent medieval texts (notably Cad Goddeu, Preiddeu Annwfn, and Pa Ŵr Yw’r Porthor).
I’ll get the bad out of the way: while I think Glyn is doing interesting things with cosmic horror (as I’ll discuss below), a lot of the story premises themselves were familiar from Lovecraft, in the sense of recalling individual Lovecraft stories. Glyn executes the premises well, and both his engagement with medieval source material and his interventions in the structure of cosmic horror were more than enough to keep me engaged as I read, but ultimately cosmic horror just…is a bit predictable at this point in its existence as a genre.
with that caveat aside, this book genuinely has made me reevaluate some of the things I’ve said about cosmic horror in the past, namely that the racism and xenophobia are in the genre’s bones, such that unless you face them head-on in a more creative way than most cosmic horror authors do you tend to end up either producing something that no longer feels like cosmic horror (if you try to avoid the problem altogether) or producing something that reproduces the racism and xenophobia but with some Diversity plastered over it.
now, Pumed Gainc y Mabinogi does, in part, take the adding-diversity route: there are women and there are people of color here (both, in the case of one of the stories I’ll talk about more specifically). but in addition to including a diverse array of protagonists, Glyn has also chosen to upend the basic premise of cosmic horror — that there is something ancient and uncaringly evil that is coming from Outside to destroy everything. Pumed Gainc y Mabinogi instead says: actually the ancient, uncaring evil was on the inside all along. to be sure, there are still inhuman, Otherworldly beings in these stories, but these beings are, here, central (and at times peripheral) figures of Welsh tradition: Pwyll, Arawn, Rhiannon, the children of Llŷr, Efnisien, Mathonwy, and more. the result is a set of stories where the horror is rooted in Welshness itself, an interrogation of the foundations of Welsh tradition and of traditionalism, rather than a paranoid retrenchment of communal norms in the face of a threatening Other.
a few stories in particular stood out on this front:
“Yn y Croen Hwn” is narrated by an ancient, alien being that sustains itself by consuming humans and wearing their skin for a while, until the skin wears out. now, this being is an immigrant (or possibly a returnee, but if so one who hasn’t been back to what’s now Wales in thousands of years), but the climax of the story turns on its human acquaintance — an old friend of its skin’s previous inhabitant — denying its identity not as his friend but rather as Welsh. more out of offense — and an awareness that its disguise is finally slipping — than out of genuine malice, the being consumes the man, but only after affirming its Welshness:
Dwi yn Gymro. Ddim bwys mod i’n dod o le ac amser a realiti sydd tu hwnt i glem unrhyw adyn o Gymru fach. Ddim bwys mod i wedi troedio priddoedd cannoedd o wledydd y ddaear dros filenia cyn cyrraedd y pridd hwn. Ddim bwys mod i’n gwisgo’r croen yma, neu unrhyw groen arall. Bellach, mae’r iaith yn fy atomau, yr afonydd yn fy einioes, y ddraig yn fy nghrombil. Dwi’n dechrau wylo wrth ddeall.
a number of other stories include characters who are similarly Welsh-by-choice or who have ambivalent relationships to Welshness. Noor, the narrator of “Y Gwyliwr ar y Tŵr”, begins by noting that she’s found it difficult to make friends in Ceredigion, “ai o achos lliw fy nghroen neu acen fy Nghymraeg”. by the end of the story, her one friend — the elderly Mererid — has died, leaving Noor not only her house but also her duty as Watcher over Ceredigion Bay and over those families in the community who originated in Cantre’r Gwaelod and have an agenda not necessarily friendly to human life. as I observed the other day, there’s a reading of this story as being about the destructiveness of Welsh tradition and the idea of Cymreictod: Mererid has effectively trapped Noor within a Tradition™ such that she cannot leave it without being destroyed.
other standout stories included “Lleu”, which casts Lleu Llaw Gyffes and Blodeu(w)edd as childhood friends/perhaps lovers separated by one of them joining a cult. “Rigantona” is a longer story that reworks the First Branch to center Rhiannon — Glyn takes it for granted that at some point Rhiannon was a goddess but also frames that deification as an exaggeration of an original human woman who interacted with the Otherworld of Annwfn — and engage more critically with the gendered violence in the story. “Tannau’r Delyn Ddu” is in some ways a kind of off-brand “The Music of Erich Zann”, but its play with narration and the intrusion of an unfamiliar past was a nice, fresh-feeling change of pace. “Yr Arswyd yn y Darlun” likewise recalls “Pickman’s Model” but gets points for its deeply unsettling conclusion.
the weakest stories were the ones like “Arswyd y Maen” that simply recapitulated a Lovecraft plot (in this case: man descends into hidden underground city, finds out there’s an inhuman entity still living there, and narrowly escapes). these stories are well-constructed for what they are, but the Horrifying Reveals at the end do fall a bit flat because I already know exactly what to expect from having read Lovecraft.
running through the collection are an array of forces, entities, and objects, most notably the Llyfr Glas, which contains the text of the titular Fifth Branch of the Mabinogi, revealing — possibly — what horrible things Pryderi encountered in Annwfn after his death. this was a fun bit of interplay between Lovecraft’s idea of evil books and the major manuscripts of medieval Welsh literature. why shouldn’t there be an evil version of the Red Book of Hergest?
I also really enjoyed Glyn’s writing throughout the book. the narration in different stories feels markedly distinct, sometimes as a result of dialect and sometimes register, which is a huge potential pitfall in this kind of book: it would be easy for everything to just sound the same, the way Lovecraft’s protagonists tend to, but Glyn’s characters do not. he also strikes a really nice balance between informal speech and literary language — much of the book is literary in register without being fully Literary Welsh, formal while remaining engaging and personable throughout.
all in all, Pumed Gainc y Mabinogi is an impressive collection that successfully not only avoids but challenges the flaws of its precursors while producing something that feels effectively like cosmic horror. at its most original, it’s a sophisticated and creative engagement with Welsh literary tradition — both its content and its weight in the present; at its least original, it’s well-constructed and engagingly written cosmic horror. good stuff.
moods: dark, inspiring, tense