The Erstwhile
The Vorrh Trilogy • Book 2
by Brian Catling
Why You'll Love This
Fallen angels are pulling themselves back together in London basements while a cyclops leads a rescue mission into a forest that erases memory — and neither story is the strangest thing happening.
- Great if you want: dark, mythic fantasy that refuses to explain itself tidily
- The experience: dense and hallucinatory — demands patience, rewards deep attention
- The writing: Catling writes like a painter — image-heavy, strange, and deliberately unsettling
- Skip if: you haven't read The Vorrh — this picks up without hand-holding
About This Book
In the vast, primordial forest known as the Vorrh, something is deeply wrong — and the consequences stretch far beyond its ancient borders. Brian Catling's sequel to The Vorrh expands its world outward into colonial Africa, Victorian London, and the scarred landscapes of Germany, where fallen angels are stirring back to life after centuries of failure and silence. These are the Erstwhile, creatures neither fully divine nor fully lost, and their reawakening pulls against a web of human ambition, mysterious children, and a forest that refuses to release what it has taken. The stakes feel genuinely cosmic without ever losing their intimacy — this is a book preoccupied with what it means to be human when the inhuman surrounds you on all sides.
Catling writes like a sculptor working in language — dense, tactile, and unhurried, with imagery that accumulates rather than announces itself. The Erstwhile rewards readers willing to move at its pace, surrendering to a prose style that sits somewhere between myth and fever dream. Threads from multiple continents and registers of reality weave together without neat resolution, trusting readers to hold contradictions and find meaning in the gaps. It is strange, ambitious, and absolutely its own thing.
