Wakenhyrst
by Michelle Paver
“Something has been let loose…”
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.
When he finds a painted medieval devil in a graveyard, unhallowed forces are awakened.
Maud’s battle has begun. 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.
Spanning five centuries, Wakenhyrst is a darkly gothic thriller about murderous obsession and one girl’s longing to fly free by the bestselling author of Dark Matter and Thin Air. Wakenhyrst is an outstanding new piece of story-telling, a tale of mystery and imagination laced with terror. It is a masterwork in the modern gothic tradition that ranges from Mary Shelley and Bram Stoker to Neil Gaiman and Sarah Perry.
With crisp, gray skies and roads strewn with leaves just outside the window, there’s no better time than autumn to read Gothic novels. The sense of dread, of macabre possibility, seems to seep from the page into real life, each biting breeze ready to whisk a reader away to somewhere more isolated. After saving Wakenhyrst specifically for autumn reading to make the most of the experience, I was eager to delve into this story at last.
Wakenhyrst is gripping and immersive from the first page. The novel opens with an article and letters, all written in the late 1960s, that plunge readers into a story of irresistible intrigue, introducing Maud, her father, and the unsettling history of a manor in the small hamlet of Wakenhyrst, England. With a foundation of gruesome events and unanswered questions firmly established, Wakenhyrst then takes readers back to the events in question, sixty years earlier. There was a sense of slipping into an already woven tale, just waiting for it to unravel around you. Settling into Maud’s life in Wake’s End, the manor, was effortless, familiar, and utterly compelling. The isolated manor trope is a mainstay of the Gothic horror genre, one that is often used to do the heavy lifting of creating atmosphere and intrigue within a novel. Paver, however, doesn’t rely on the trope; she brings it to life with each word on the page, creating a dark atmosphere of isolation, secrecy, and fear that is almost tangible. Folklore mixes with staunchly-held Christian beliefs in Wakenhyrst, where townsfolk attend church but can’t quite let go of their superstitions that haunt, and define, the Fens. This tethers the story to something ancient, a sense of old fear in a place where inexplicable powers hold sway. The incredibly rich atmosphere and intrigue permeate every page, hooking me immediately.
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We meet Maud as a child in the repressive isolation and secrecy of Wake’s End as she grapples with the loss of her mother and struggles under her father’s commanding presence. Maud is isolated in more than just location; as the oldest of her much younger siblings, she is alone in her daily life, alone in grieving her mother, alone in her understanding of life at Wake’s End and the desire to be out from under her father’s rule. As her father’s only daughter, she is also isolated as the only female member of her family left—unimportant, incapable, and harmless as any other woman in her father’s eyes. We move through periods of Maud’s childhood as she grows into her teenage years, as she carves space for herself within Wake’s End. She grows to realize that she can grant herself little freedoms, that her own beliefs may lie somewhere outside of what everyone else in Wakenhyrst believes, that perhaps the only thing worth believing in is the one thing she holds most dearly: the fen. There’s a richness to this story that is enhanced by its unhurried pace, by the fact that readers get to sit still within Wake’s End as threads of intrigue, mystery, and building suspense are woven steadily around us as we come to know Maud, her father, and Wakenhyrst itself throughout years of her life.
Maud’s father’s discovery of an unsettling, grotesque painting of devils marks a shift in life at Wake’s End. Always a controlling, but logical, man, Edmund Stearne has changed since first setting eyes on the painting—and Maud notices. Paranoid and erratic, Edmund’s work as a historian comes to intersect with the history of the painting—the Doom—and his obsession becomes Maud’s mission to understand. The life of Alice Pyett, a woman who claimed God spoke through her centuries ago, has absorbed him as the focus of his work, but now her diary entries, which Edmund is translating and which readers are able to read, fuel his own paranoia. Through firsthand journal entries, readers—and Maud—come to know Edmund’s thoughts intimately as he faces what he fears he set loose in discovering the Doom. Something ancient, something uncontrollable, something evil. The atmosphere and folklore of the fens comes to life, the utterly compelling story unfolding in a way that is impossible to look away from. There are secrets at Wake’s End and secrets her father keeps and Maud will have them unraveled before her. But as the story unfolds, not all is clear; is it madness or is history repeating itself? Is Edmund paranoid or has something actually been wakened? Is there truth to the local superstitions of the Fens? Though a quietly told tale, Wakenhyrst rises to a thrilling crescendo that is unsettling and surprising.
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Paver is a fantastic writer. The atmosphere she created was Gothic perfection—eerie, unsettling, full of the sense of long-kept secrets and the unknown. The novel’s structure and pacing, with the inclusion of both Edmund’s and Alice Pyett’s journal entries, was gripping. Maud was a captivating character whose experience and perspective enriched the story with something deeper than just the events of the plot—the desires and hopes of a young girl, the resistance to injustice that can come in so many small forms.
Wakenhyrst was the perfect gothic novel. It takes familiar tropes and uses them exquisitely, building a fantastically atmospheric and compelling story upon their foundation. History, religion, folklore, and fear all meet in Wake’s End in a story that is complexly woven, brilliantly structured, and completely engrossing. For Gothic horror readers, Wakenhyrst cannot be missed.