A romantic cabin getaway doesn’t go exactly as planned. High up on the windswept cliffs of Pale Peak, Faye and Felix celebrate their new engagement. But soon, a chorus of ghastly noises erupts from the nearby the screams of animals, the cries of children, and the mad babble of a hundred mournful voices. A dark figure looms near the windows in the dead of night, whispering to Faye. As the weather turns deadly, Felix discovers that his terrified fiancée isn’t just mumbling in her sleep – she’s whispering back.
Overall, I quite enjoyed this novel. It has its flaws, but on the whole, it’s absolutely worth the read.
There’s a lot to love here, and I thing the thing I loved the most was the very real relationship between Felix and Faye. Their sarcastic dialogue back and forth and just the overall interaction between the two, for me, was spot on, and it did much of the heavy lifting to invest me in this novel. You don’t necessarily have to like the characters in a novel, but you have to care for them in some way. I really cared for Faye and Felix.
Side note: I have no idea why Felix Blackwell the author chose to write a book starring Felix Blackwell the main character, but it’s a bold choice, and I have to say, I kind of dug it.
Almost every one of the horrific scenes did exactly what they were supposed to do. They were dark, they were unsettling, they grabbed me by the throat and didn’t release me. Exactly what a horror novel should do. And the big bad in the novel was very cool.
If I had to point to anything that I found a touch off-putting, it might be the length of the novel, as we were treated to fairly similar scenes with Faye on multiple occasions. In my humble opinion, had Blackwell (the author, not the character) chosen two or three “set-piece” scenes of horror, and packed all the scary goodness into them, it would have cut down on the repetitions and made this a bit more fast-paced compelling read. But having said that, I will say I never truly felt the story dragged at all.
I will say, I caught some The Manitou vibes off the book. Story-wise, the two books are utterly different, but both utilize similar tropes…an ancient evil that comes back and fixates on white people, indigenous sources are called upon and offer up just enough information to understand what’s happening, but not enough to outright defeat it easily, and the indigenous sources are also ultimately claimed by the ancient evil, leaving the whites to sort out the mess on their own.
But Blackwell does handle it far better than Masterton does.
And while the indigenous characters are absolutely brought in to shed light on what’s going on, I liked that they weren’t automatic experts. There were large gaps in their knowledge, a minor but significant plot and character point that added yet another touch of realism.
The only other two sticking points I have are Faye’s parents, and the wrap up at the end of the book. Minor spoilers ahead…(highlight with mouse to read)
Faye’s parents first. In the novel, Faye’s going through hell. The parents hold the secret, but really don’t want to give it up, even in the case of Faye severely suffering. Blackwell really didn’t give a lot of motivation behind why they’d hold back for so long, other than the mom was a pain in the butt. Even less touched upon was why a family holds a cabin on a mountain that they never visit, but never try to unload, despite their reluctance to ever go there. If they don’t like the place…why keep it for decades? Even if we’d been given some sign of, “well, we tried, but every damn time someone looked at it, they seemed to get the creeps and we never got an offer on the place.” Even that one sentence would have gone a long way to explaining.
And then there’s the wrap up at the end, when all is said and done. It’s my opinion that, if you need to have an info dump at the end to explain why everything happened the way it did—in this case, why the ancient evil glommed on to Faye so hard, and how she was able to defeat it so easily in the end…perhaps too easily, to be honest, but we’ll let that one go…then the author didn’t necessarily do a good enough job of working that into the narrative throughout the book. And that’s all I’ll say about that.
End of spoilers
So, as I said at the beginning, the book is not without it’s flaws—and really, what novel isn’t, in some way? —but overall, it’s a good, creepy read. Worth the time.
