[Gene Wolfe's The Devil in a Forest] may or may not be a fantasy; there is a passing reference to something that may have been a supernatural incident in objective fact, rather than simply something that haunted the troubled sleep of Mark, the weaver's apprentice….

In any event, this tale of a catastrophic few days in a Medieval English hamlet is told so beautifully, and gathers power at such a nicely controlled pace, that there is no getting out of it once you get into it.

Wolfe is just amazing with milieu…. [He makes] real people out of personalities formed in no world of ours, clothing and housing them, causing them to move and speak with absolute fidelity to verisimilitude. In addition, every board has its creak, every footpath its heelmarks, every tree its leaves. The guy is just an unbelievably effective writer, and a hell of a...