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.

DARK LONDON: A Journey Through the City's Mysterious and Macabre Underworld, for the ghoulish giftee closest to your heart

DARK LONDON: A Journey Through the City's Mysterious and Macabre Underworld
DR. DREW GRAY
Frances Lincoln Ltd (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$22.99 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Dark London brings together the history of the city’s seamier side, picking out the most scandalous, curious and bizarre aspects of London’s shadowy and fascinating underbelly.

From dark crimes of passion to shocking tales of grave robbing, gruesome murders, dens of iniquity, Victorian séances, and haunted houses—not far beneath London’s everyday bustle and glitter there has long been a fascinatingly rich underworld of criminality, superstition, scandal, and macabre debauchery.

In Dark London, social historian Dr Drew Gray, a specialist in the history of crime and punishment, delves into the city’s grim yet compelling past, uncovering the people and places that shaped its darker identity.

Across more than 100 real-life cases and curiosities, he explores how London became both the heart of a growing empire and a stage for vice, greed, and human fallibility.

Highlights include:

The London Burkers, a notorious gang of resurrectionists whose leader confessed to stealing and selling nearly 1,000 bodies to London’s medical schools in the 1830s.

The Whitechapel Murders of 1888, still the world’s longest running serial murder mystery.

The prisons of Newgate and Pentonville, where shifting attitudes towards justice revealed the tension between punishment, reform, and moral control.

The legend of Spring-heeled Jack, the terrifying, leaping figure who caused panic across London’s streets.

The Great Stink of 1858, when London’s polluted Thames brought the city to a standstill and forced a revolution in sanitation and public health.

Dark London brings together the history of the city’s seamier side, picking out the most scandalous, curious and bizarre aspects of London’s shadowy and fascinating underbelly.

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

My Review: London's been a world city, most of the time, since the Romans lost Colchester in 60CE and moved their colonial government there. Lots of scope for serious weirdness of the supernatural stuff sort, and viciousness (or just misguided trying to help) of the human sort. Both leave separate kinds of stains on the memory of society, locally as well as internationally.

Author Drew Gray's biography as provided by Frances Lincoln Ltd:

Dr. Drew Gray is a social historian of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries who specialises in the history of crime and punishment. Drew is Head of Subject for Culture (Humanities, Media, & Performance) at the University of Northampton and teaches modules on both the History and Criminology programmes. His previous works include Murder Maps: Crime Scenes Revisited; Phrenology to Fingerprint 1811-1911 and London's Shadows: The Dark Side of the Victorian City.

That's one helluva CV. The gent knows how to present the facts and images in tandem, all illustrated books from him to date, so why would this one fail? Spoiler: It doesn't.

The history of crime, the historical context of punishment, the social context of these dark patches of London's history aren't exhaustively explored in this handsome gift book. I felt the illustrations were well-chosen and -presented; but sometimes pulled well above their weight in explication of societal details. I can't give full five stars because I was niggled by this, despite this being the book's literal purpose for being an illustrated overview.

We all have a well-loved ghoul somewhere on our gifting list. Someone who really enjoys the frisson of crime and punishment, who wants that extra thrill of knowing what humans are capable of...and this is the book for them. It's also very much a book for your Londonphile/Anglophile giftee. I think you, faithful reader, might like it for your own coffee table.

Here, look at some of the more than a hundred images:

contents

punishment

murder

spooky stuff

humanitarian harms done

A very nice gifting idea for Yule...especially suitable for the Goth nibling/grandchild.