On the Overgrown Path: Now on Sale!

En route from Bratislava to Prague in the deceptive spring of the 1920s, Leoš Janácek, famed opera composer, ethnographer, and amateur psychologist, is stranded in an obscure and enigmatic mountain village, lured from his train by a song of blood. Here, Janácek must become a detective far from home. Attempting to solve a bizarre murder in which he himself is suspect — and whose perpetrator might be a wild animal, a jealous lover, or Nature unhinged — he brings to bear his singular skills of observation and poetic insight, and most importantly, his belief in the truthfulness of the "little melodies" heard in everyday life: the cry of a bird, the plash of snow from the eaves, the horrendous lie voiced with a smile. What he uncovers is a many-stranded aria of ravenous Nature and mischievous Time, threatening to consume his world.

David Herter, author of the acclaimed, stylish novels Ceres Storm and Evening's Empire, has written a rich and dark fantasy growing from the very roots of Janácek's idiosyncratic soul.


On the Overgrown Path is the first of a trilogy of novellas, centering on a group of artists in the First Czechoslovak Republic, and their encounters with evil both human and otherworldly. The Luminous Depths (with an introduction by Stephen Baxter) followed last year, and this fall sees the publication of the final volume, One Who Disappeared (with an introduction by Brian Stableford).

Here are excerpts from John Clute's introduction:

There is something about Europe Between the Wars that does not leave us. (...)

"David Herter's On the Overgrown Path is a small, poignant, redemptive codicil to this long farewell, but without the bitterness. It is set in the very heart of Europe, at a moment just subsequent to the terminal convulsions of World War One, somewhere between Prague and Vienna: between Zembla and Graustark: between the Castle and the Wild Wood. A vigorous elderly gentleman, old enough not to have been killed in the trenches but to have suffered in other ways, is on a train somewhere in Slovakia, somewhere apparently adjacent to the shrunken remains of Austria. Every sound of any significance that comes to his ear is notated carefully in a small book. (...)"

At nearly 70, Janácek is a dominating figure, his burly "peasant" features engraved with lines of authority and passion: his face is a score of his life. And his life is Czechoslovakia: he creates his country by inscribing its every sound into his notebook, its church bells, its birds, the inflections of spoken Czech; by translating such inscriptions into the driven patchwork onomatopoeia of his mature music, he creates operas which are a body English of the life of the new land; by copying he creates: he is an alchemist: a magus: a father of his country. In the world of the fantastic that anyone seems to inhabit who wishes to describe Europe Between the Wars – Czechoslovakia in her two decades of light – Janácek is a dangerous man.(...)"

We know that On the Overgrown Path will almost certainly take Leoš Janácek into the Wild Woods that circumambulate any small town whose languages are many (he does not know them all) and whose flag changes yearly (he is not entirely certain that he's still in Czechoslovakia) in the Indian summer of a Europe we know will not survive another winter. So Janácek does hear a haunting fragment of music whose singer he tracks – as devastatingly relentless as any genius groping to transfigure the actual into the Real – until he finds her corpse: which has been impaled by something like the tooth of a giant of the Wild Woods. Just as there are touches of D. M. Thomas's The White Hotel (1981) in Herter's depiction through his beloved Janácek of the warp and weave of a civilization under stress, so there are suggestions of Algernon Blackwood's "The Willows" (1907) in the way he spells his great composer into tranced rapport with whatever breathes there and does not wish to be taken into music. "