In her comatose state she believes she’s being kept prisoner in a series of castles or caers ( caerau in Welsh), menaced by a forest of encroaching trees. For a few months now her family are distraught, resorting to displacement activities – the father and mother being largely absent at work, and her brother Robert losing himself in his art – all observed by Mac, a concerned Catholic priest.īut then things come to a head when Rob becomes a paid volunteer on a nearby hush-hush archaeological dig and, almost simultaneously, is drawn willy-nilly into a New Age ritual at the Avebury stone circle, destined to help what seems to be a shape-shifting druid escape from a pursuer.Īs we watch things play out in the mundane world of the chalk downs of southern Britain we start to become aware of a voice breaking into the narrative, the voice of somebody who ostensibly is lying in a coma, a state where archetypes and monsters freely roam the voice in fact of a sleeping beauty surrounded by dark woods.Īlthough we might assume that Rob is the principal protagonist in Darkhenge it turns out that Chloe is the real mover and shaker.

On: Gorse.Ĭhloe, a deeply troubled teenager living in the shadow of her brother, a talented artist, is in hospital in a coma after a horse-riding accident on the Marlborough Downs. ‘No one,’ she said firmly, ‘treats me like a little girl.