Gregory excels at fierce little novels about city men who move to the country, and discover, to their growing horror, how Nature can act as a mirror for a primitive unmanageable maleness they have never confronted before. This powerfully sensual tale is about a solicitor's clerk who tries to exile himself from his inner violence by fleeing to a tiny cottage in the woods of Welsh Snowdonia. He becomes obsessed with the woodwitch (a fungus shaped like a penis), then with various dead and/or disturbing animals that appear to him, and finally, with the depths of his own sexuality.