Wistman's Wood - A Tale of the Moors and Beyond: A science-Fantasy Novella
This novel began, as many stories do, with a place.
Wistman’s Wood is real. It exists on the high moorland of Dartmoor in Devon, England—a stunted oak forest growing impossibly from a chaos of moss-covered granite boulders. The trees are ancient, twisted, draped in lichen like the beards of druids. Walking through it feels like stepping sideways out of time. Local legend claims it’s haunted, that the Wisht Hounds—spectral hunting dogs—run through it at night, and that Old Crockern, the spirit of the moor, makes his home there.
I visited Wistman’s Wood on a spring morning much like the one that opens this book. Standing among those gnarled oaks, I felt something I can only describe as presence—not threatening, but ancient and aware. It was the kind of feeling that makes you question the boundaries between the material and the numinous, between what we can measure and what we can only sense.
That experience planted the seed for this novel, but the question that grew from it was larger: What if human consciousness itself has been constrained? What if we’re capable of so much more—more empathy, more foresight, more connection—but something holds us back?
The metaphysical framework of this story—the idea of a “grey mist” encoded in our DNA, limiting our capacity for compassion and long-term thinking—is, of course, fiction. But it’s fiction that asks a real question: Why do we, as a species, so often fail to act in our own collective interest? Why do we struggle to feel the suffering of distant others, to care about future generations, to see ourselves as part of a larger whole?
Some might answer with evolutionary biology: we’re wired for tribal survival, not global cooperation. Others might point to social structures, economic systems, or cultural conditioning. This novel doesn’t claim to have the answer. Instead, it asks: What if the limitation isn’t inevitable? What if it could be lifted?
I chose to leave the central event of the novel—the solstice ritual and its aftermath—deliberately ambiguous. Did Michael and his companions truly perform a mystical intervention that altered human consciousness? Was it mass delusion, a placebo effect on a global scale? Or was it something in between—a collective shift in awareness that happened because people believed it could?
I don’t know. More importantly, Michael doesn’t know. And that uncertainty is the point.
📖 Available on Amazon: https://amzn.to/4uZEkp3 [https://amzn.to/4uZEkp3]
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