Sir Thomas More by Hals Holbein (Accessed via Wikipedia ) During lockdown, we had Time. Remember that? I was in my probationary year of teaching: almost certainly among the most exhausting years for any profession. All my time had been taken up with school work, and I regularly stayed at school until after 6pm, having arrived there at eight in the morning. Now, children, this is not sustainable and, very soon, I decided I didn’t like working where I was. Then I realised that I didn’t like teaching at all. But, in fact, neither was particularly true: I just needed to be true to myself and to say no, which would give me the ability to manage my work/life balance in a more appropriate way. What does this have to do with historical fiction, I hear you say? Well, during March 2020, we went into lockdown and suddenly I went from working ten-hour-days to ten-hour-weeks. I met up with my class on Google Meet, I put work up for them on a meticulously designed Google Classroom, but I just h...
Review
I feel slightly bad writing this review because I googled the author, Reg Gadney, and discovered that he died in 2018. He seems to have been a very interesting person, who created many great things throughout a very creative and fruitful lifetime.
Unfortunately, this book isn't one of those things.
There are two things I really loved about it. The first is the blurb, which is shared at the end of this review. This is a book which sounds perfect for me, and I'm still looking forward to reading the story that I believed it would be.
The second is the personal inscription which is in my copy. You see, someone who knows me really well also read the blurb and immediately thought of me! What could possibly go wrong?!
It turns out that a book can look perfect for someone but still not be a good fit. But, honestly, this is just not a good book.
There are one or two characters who threaten to be realistic but every single one of them maintains an air of unlikability, so you don't particularly care what happens to any of them.
We have Hal, the absolute idiot who, despite the fact that he's aware of how weird his mother's nurses are, never bothers to move into Carlisle until the Christmas is over (despite the author's heavy-handed attempts to make it clear how very wealthy he is).
There's the nurses themselves, possibly witches, possibly religious extremists, possibly adult pantomime villains who you want to boo and hiss at at various times throughout the book.
You also have Sumiko (the woman Hal's having an affair with, professes to be in love with, then promptly forgets about) whose young daughter experiences a horrific trauma and yet who finds almost immediate solace by Cooking For Her Man. Yeuch!
Finally, there are various named villagers, who are all so two-dimensional that it's a wonder they're not found blowing like kites around the freezing English countryside.
The plot is bizarre too. Other reviewers have mentioned that it doesn't know whether it's horror or a thriller, and that's a big identity crisis which runs through the book.
I actually found myself laughing as it got towards the end, when it suddenly jerks way off piste and you're faced with a very different kind of story to the one you've painstakingly read through for the past 78 chapters.
Finally, disappointingly for Gothic fiction, the shock-and-gore value of this book is far greater than the writing quality. I looked to be scared but never got any further than being repulsed or, more precisely, ick-ed.
The book would have benefited significantly from some heavier editing. Discovering that the author was also a screenwriter explains their obsession with pages and pages of speech, but an editor ought to have put a stop to that.
To summarise, I cannot think of a single thing to recommend this book, but please let me know if you ever choose to write the story which is on the blurb because I'm still waiting to read it.
Blurb
Captain Hal Stirling is flown to England from Afghanistan after a roadside bomb renders him battered and broken.
Once home, he retreats to his ancestral family seat of Stirling Towers - a gothic mansion that dominates the landscape near the remote Scottish Borders - for a Christmas of quiet recuperation. But on arrival he discovers that his mother, a fanatical spiritualist, has died and been hastily buried.
Isolated from the insular local community, Hal finds himself at the mercy of his mother's two mysterious nurses, the harshest winter on record and, before long, the horrific visions; experiences he attributes to his heavy medication. Yet as the December weather deteriorates, so does Hal's certainty that his home is a place of safety.
Who, or what, is trying to frighten him to death?
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