Robert Holdstock died today. His books, which I read my senior year in high school, were instrumental in laying a foundation for my first attempts at genuine, authentic spirituality. He wrote vision-quests spectacular where his heroes and heroines delved into a real and fantastic landscape simultaneously composed of the individual psyche and the entire well of the human collective unconscious reaching to the most primordial centers of humanity’s existence.
When I first read Lavondyss, it grabbed hold of me immediately. Holdstock’s prose is hypnotic and mythic: he played word-melodies on the absolute deepest chords of the psyche. I have recently re-read a few of his books, and his work continues to influence my present spiritual development.
If you have not read Holdstock, you should. The world will be poorer without him.
I hadn’t heard of him before today, but doing a teensy bit of research turned up lots of talk about being among the handful of fantasy authors whose work is a worthy successor to the Tolkien legacy. High praise.