Unknown Regions

i thought this book was not as good as some of his other novels, but a great fantasy nonetheless

Holdstock is excellent at creating an atmosphere of the uncanny and ancient, evoking the fears and beliefs that lie in the marrow of our bones, from a time before words. This story, of a strange child adopted by two rather shallow and self-absorbed academics, who retreats into an invented but increasingly powerful mythological world, involved me closely most of the way. As his father discovers and exploits the boy's power to 'fetch' (the title is a rather clever pun) antiquities out of the past, he also begins to love his son, perhaps too late to save him, and perhaps too late to save anyone. The ending wasn't totally satisfactory for me. I felt it rationalised or diminished the sheer strangeness that had kept me reading. Others may feel it substituted a new and more frightening strangeness.