I enjoyed her as a narrator because she’s grounded and she’s real. You forget quite often that she’s so young because she so often conducts herself with such mature intelligence. While the start of the book is set during the 60s – most of it consists of following Maud through her childhood days until the age of 16. We slam home in an active, lived-in grand home in the English countryside, set in a community, located near a village and surrounded by a dark, dangerous and mystical fen. Gone are the cold, lonely, distant mountain peaks and empty snow lands. A definite shift from her other novels (not least because the lead character is female (resulting in a lot of frustrating male ‘don’t worry your plain little head’ scenarios)) it’s also new and different and fresh. Third novel (in horror), Paver’s got the hang of it. Wakenhyrst may not boot Dark Matter out of first place in regards to the fact that I just hold it dearer to my heart – but (from what I remember of Dark Matter) Wakenhyrst is superior in writing. Thin Air is grand but it’s almost a repeat of Dark Matter. There’s no outright gore or guns blazing or hacking a zombie in half with a machete.Īnd while I’m all for the decapitation of the living dead, I do love my subtle horror.ĭark Matter will always remain my favourite of the three books. She has a way of writing horror that could have been found in the era of classic ghost stories. A colleague introduced me via Dark Matter and I adored it. Spanning five centuries, Wakenhyrst is a darkly gothic thriller about murderous obsession and one girl’s longing to fly free. She must survive a world haunted by witchcraft, the age-old legends of her beloved fen – and the even more nightmarish demons of her father’s past.

When he finds a painted medieval devil in a graveyard, unhallowed forces are awakened. In Edwardian Suffolk, a manor house stands alone in a lost corner of the Fens: a glinting wilderness of water whose whispering reeds guard ancient secrets. Maud is a lonely child growing up without a mother, ruled by her repressive father.

Michelle paver wakenhyrst review