Ness

On a salt-and-shingle island, inside a ruined concrete structure called The Green Chapel, a figure known as The Armourer leads a black mass with terrible intent. Something is approaching to stop him.

Five more-than-human forms travel toward the chapel across land, sea and time. They are heading for a point where they will converge and become Ness, a being with lichen skin, willow-bones and hagstones for eyes. Ness is made of tidal drift, green moss and deep time, and speaks only in birds.

The book asks what happens when land comes to life, and what would push land to need to. Ness has come to take the island back.

Robert Macfarlane's words and Stanley Donwood's images work together here. The result is a short modern myth that combines novella, prose-poem and mystery play, with a dark, uneasy edge.

The confrontation at the chapel, between a man with a black mass and a creature of moss and bone, is what the pages build toward.