Slim but astonishing ... Those expecting the novel to replicate that show’s raunchy titillation will instead find in The Living Realm a far more elegiac, meditative work. Tannahill writes as gorgeously about nature...as he does about bodies ... Extraordinary and sensitive.
Our narrator...doesn’t have a name, which is economical since he doesn’t have a personality either ... In non-professional circles, this is what’s known as padding, and The Living Realm has more of it than a furniture showroom. This is a dead giveaway that a novel should have been a short story, and it’s hardly saved by our narrator’s eventual inner crisis, when he decides to surrender himself to whatever the heck is going on in the woods:
