SLEEPERS IN THE SNOW, pretty sentences telling a supremely silly story just for fun...it is!

SLEEPERS IN THE SNOW
JOANNE HARRIS
Pegasus Crime (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$18.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: A gripping and powerful suspense story of love, loss, and the mysteries of memory by internationally bestselling author Joanne Harris.

Out on the moor, in the snow, a house stands beneath a pylon. It is a house full of memories and old things. And, in the dark, when the pylon sings in the wind, it is a house full of ghosts and fading memories . . .

The house, Kirkhill, has a new occupant—just moved in, fresh from a bitter divorce and looking for a new start. The moor is the perfect place for isolated, beautiful in the changing seasons, peaceful, and with just enough of the previous owners’ belongings that it’s a perfectly self-contained and cozy home.

Only, as the nights start to draw in and the weather takes a turn, so does the house. The cozy isolation becomes menacing, animals begin acting strangely, and it seems someone could be watching the house. And the diaries of the previous owners begin to reveal a terrible tragedy which befell Kirkhill—one which its new occupant may be unable to escape.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Midsommar meets gender-flipped Rebecca sans Mrs. Danvers. Our unnamed narrator doesn't feel to the reader like he really belongs in Kirkhill—why is he so grateful the previous occupants left their stuff behind?—but we're on a slow reveal schedule with only him to rely on for details of what exactly happened in his past as well as is happening in the present. Was getting an isolated big pile of a place isolated on the moors a particularly sound idea for a recently divorced guy? (Not really, as it happens. Not precisely unexpectedly.)

As our PoV man ruminates about how angry he is at Her (must've been infidelity, nothing makes fictional men madder), he distracts himself by nosing into Caroline and Arthur's left-behind diaries. Right on cue, the house starts moving stuff around, making small things disappear and furniture suddenly be in shin-barking places. It's left nebulous if he believes this is why stuff is moving; as he is not getting any younger it's probably the ordinary aging memory issues.

My eyes rolled so far back I saw my brain. Hauntings aren't ever going to convince me presented like this. The spooky stuff-moving-around trope is bollocks; real hauntings are memories you can't shake, love you did not give when you could have, wanted to, but didn't; memories you cherish and can not ever share because they weren't made in shareable ways. This guy reads someone else's diary and somehow it all matters enough to him that he is going a bit crazy over what he has no way to know or reason to trust is not a lie or a fantasy?

It sounds like I disliked the read. I mostly didn't. I mostly fell in love woth Author Harris's beautifully evocative sentences taking me into chilly drafts, wide vistas of unpopulated ground that can't be built on because it's that halfway point between bog and dirt that is moorland, all to the souundtrack of the huge electrical pylon that's right over the house huuming and buzzing. Of course it's there over the house...it's the only buildable land for macres around. As someone who's had tinnitus since the mumps left me with them in 1965 (I think), I can confirm the sound of electricity buzzzing and humming can be very soothing or very very annoying, depending on one's mood and/or the other ambient sounds.

It's the kiind of detail that the author had no way to know anyone would for sre have experience of, but she got the effect of that kind of eerie variable hum on a person's mood, without ever obtruding into full awareness for someone whose tinnitus is not necessarily real, would have or know. Still she got it right. And not by accident. That's excellent craft work. My headcanoon is that the narrator does have tinnitus but there is no direct factual statement to that effect.

What there is, comme d'habitude with Joanne Harris, is good writing telling a good story about a person whose feelings are powerfully agitated; and we go on the journey through those feelings with the person until...an end is reached. It was not really an ending but it definitely was the egress from the story.

Well worth the trip for her fans, and if (like me) you loved Piranesi you'll hear echoes from that megaton explosion of creativity.