Birthday present from Sue & Shandy.

Sigh. Never judge a book by it's cover, I guess. Because I really liked that cover.

The author combines a whole handful of half-cooked ideas - a cult, an old estate, the fens, witches, a former asylum, ghosts, a serial killer - instead of properly developing one or two of them (which could have resulted in a readable mediocre book). And the witing style doesn't make up for what I'm missing plot-wise: it is clumsy and badly edited. ("She tried to rationalise it in her brain." Seriously?) The way that hauntings are being treated (especially in the later part of "Fairy Angela's" narrative) is exasperating. And as if that wasn't enough to make the book unreadable, the characters are extremely wooden throughout. It's not just that you can't engage with them and get interested in what's happening to them, it's as if the writer had always had a predecided plot arc in mind and just made them follow that path. They aren't human; they aren't believable; they don't have agency. Which ruins any reading experience for me.

Oh, and if your write about psychology/psychiatry, why use the term "subconscious" at all, never mind countless times?!

I firmly believe that every book finds its reader. This one is travelling to the Netherlands now as a wishlist RABCK. Hope it will make better friends than me. ;)

And it has arrived safely. Thank you so much for this wishlist book, anathema-device!

I liked this book well enough, but I didn't love it. It promised to be haunting and scary, and that just didn't happen for me. Which is a pity, because I really liked the author's talk at the Ipswich Unconvention. An OK read for me.

Taking it to the annual Convention in Mainz.

I took this book from the book buffet at the Mainz convention - mainly because of the pretty cover, anathema-device!
I'll give it its chance.