The Deepest Furrow

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A FOLK HORROR MASTERPIECE FROM MOUNT ABRAXAS PRESS.

Original Woodcut Illustrations by Matúš Ďurčík.

The entire book is printed on dark deep blue paper.

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Set in the inter-war years somewhere in Europe, an intellectual city dweller, compelled by a variety of conflicting circumstances and rebelling against modernism, seeks to captive enlightenment and Life's purpose in the countryside and the rural life - propelling himself into this aspiration through an amplified philosophical affinity with Nature . He seeks out isolated communities, to settle in and to therefore be able to successfully reject the modern world. He wants to find himself.

He comes, after much travelling to an isolated and insular old settlement in a deep valley, inhabited by rural folk, who after much fear, take him into their community and absorb him into their ways. The community is a thorned thicket, imbued with a private culture dependent and reinforced by the ancestral echoes of its past and present, that shuns any notion of the future. It has at its centre a deep sense of loyalty to Nature, to the beasts of the field and the diurnal cycle of the farming that they do, with humanity indistinguishable from Landscape.

What begins as a bucolic and romanticized absorption into the community then becomes a very cruel 'rites of passage' as modern identity is reversed and reverted to notions - crude and powerful - of deep ruralism and xenophobia - where the community itself in all its gnarled and inter-bred state define their way of living as if each day was a different picture, a tale, a cruel fable, where wisdom and illumination manifests through aberration and malignancy. There are also cruel twists with certain aspects of Nature defined as the migrant, the unwelcome, the lesser.

There is a shadow subtext where parts of the distant rural landscape are being given over to the construction of certain camps and where the air on the horizon is thick with ancient prejudices and its resultant human debasement.

But this is not the end of it..........

I will say no more to avoid revealing any surprises. The text is emboldened with strong poetic descriptions of Nature in all its manifestations, where the rural idyll turns in on itself. It is a celebration of the unstoppable raw Life intensity of Nature and The Olde Wayes and also a funeral mass for the notion of community and the individual, ploughed deep into the soil.

But that is not the end of it..........
But that is not the end of
But that is not the end
But that is not the
But that is not
But that is
But that
But

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