The hollowing Book

I read this 15+ years ago based on a Realms of Fantasy magazine review, and the memory of it has stuck with me. I almost want to read it again to see if I feel the same way about it.
I didn't love it at all, but it was fascinating and dark. It interested me in much the same way Exquisite Corpse by Poppi Z Brite and Under the Skin by Michael Fabre did - and I was turned off for many of the same reasons as with those books. There's a distance and coldness to the story. The characters are stark and well drawn but untouchable. The end didn't feel like an end, more like a meandering fade-out.
The forest itself is a central character in the book. It played a part in the previous books, which I never read and you don't need to in order to understand The Hollowing. The forest is populated with mythagos, distorted figures from mythology and human imagination. (Sounds good, right?!) Sometimes they were benign and sometimes threatening. I wish we were shown more viscerally what they could do because some of them were fascinating. I wanted to see the story veer further into horror, to collect on its promise. But it is very much a fantasy, which I enjoy too. It just didn't fully work for me.