My Five Word TL:DR Review: I Really Enjoyed This Story

The Winter Folk is a book that I liked even more than I anticipated. Don’t get me wrong, when I requested this I was immediately drawn in by the description ‘haunting Appalachian gothic horror ‘ – that was the absolute hook for me, I didn’t really know what to expect from the story though and I picked it up with very little knowledge other than it is a story involving the Winter Folk and a lodge known as Deerhaven.

This is basically the story of ‘Moth’. We have two timelines, in one we meet Vera, who will later be named Moth for her time working at Deerhaven and then a jump forward when Vera is now married with a daughter of her own and her husband knows her as ‘Stoker’.

Now, firstly, I will say that I’m an absolute pushover for anything gothic, add in the Appalacian setting and the fae and top it off with some wonderfully easy to read prose and you can pretty much call me a pig in mud. This book is, to all intents and purposes, hypnotic. I was totally in its thrall and enjoyed every minute I spent walking in Moth’s footsteps.

Let me elaborate on everything that worked so well for me.

The writing really is lovely. I could wallow around and soak in this writing all day long. It’s not overly verbose but sets the scene with almost casual indifference. Everything springs to life off the page and the creativity on display is simply spot on. Jen Julian manages to pull you into a world where everything is different, and strange, and a bit intimidating. She creates a fantastically tense atmosphere and, probably because you’re jumping back and forth, there is obviously some forewarning of things to come and the fact that Moth is going to get into trouble of one sort or another leaves you with this uneasy taste in your mouth as you wait for everything to go wrong. It’s compellingly unsettling.

Now, in her backstory, Moth soon makes it fairly clear that she didn’t have the best childhood or the most doting of parents. Quite the opposite in fact. Her mother’s only nod to care or affection for her daughter is the stories she tells about the forest. Kind of like tales of warning. Other than that she’s practically indifferent to her daughter and her father is absent – having taken himself off to live alone in the forest. So, Moth grows up in a home environment that is far from loving and nurturing. And this all feels linked to her coming to the notice of ‘the winter folk’. Like they zone in on unhappiness and neglect. The people they choose to work at the lodge all have stories that paint quite unhappy pictures of their home lives. Alongside this is, for me, what felt like a focus on mental health issues. The fae deliberately choose people who are at a low point, then these chosen people become almost enamoured by having been chosen, and it’s all incredibly addictive. They say they won’t return to the lodge because its dangerous, life threatening to be honest, and yet they always find excuses to return.

In terms of characters. I liked Moth, although she can be quite difficult to like at times. I liked that she comes across as quite pragmatic when dealing with the Others. She is rather besotted by the antlered man who runs the lodge and in fact this becomes a source of jealousy and a real bone of contention with two of the other workers at the lodge that have become good friends. What starts as a real feeling of camaraderie eventually turns sour as the three begin to backstab and bicker only to find out at the last minute how very sorry they are for letting their friendship take such a wrong turn.

The fae here are scary. They are meddlesome and tricksy. They’re not the disney version of fae but more your basic horror story. They wear facades to cover their true identities and drop hints of things to come, enticing the staff and making them believe in possibilities that are little more than smoke and mirrors.

I can say that I preferred the backstory elements to the more contemporary timeline although I do think it was well written and intriguing by way of the difficult relationship that Moth (Stoker) now experiences with her own daughter. In this timeline she feels like a shadow of herself almost. Like she isn’t really present. This element was kind of bittersweet because although her life has moved on she still hankers after this time from her past, she thinks of herself as Moth and she even contrives a holiday to return to the woods to try and secretly find a way back into the lodge even though she was explicitly banned. It made me feel sad for her because she never really moved on and the relationship she has with her husband feels empty somehow. That being said, she is fiercely protective of her daughter as becomes apparent when things take a drastic turn.

I did have one stumbling block with this and that’s the ending. It feels rushed, comparatively speaking. I found myself having to go back over it and even now I feel like I’m missing something fundamental. Which isn’t to say that its a bad ending, I don’t really know how to vocalise what I’m feeling to be honest and I have felt myself going over the events in my head since I finished. I would like more from this world and so on one hand the ending makes me hope that a return to the Winter Folk could very well be a possibility. But, on the other hand, the ending also makes me think that the author is pushing you to form your own conclusions, she’s given you a few breadcrumbs and now you can take yourself off and contemplate.

In conclusion, I shall be watching this author with keen interest. I really enjoyed this and can’t wait to see what she comes up with next.

I received a copy through Netgalley, courtesy of the publisher, for which my thanks. The above is my own opinion.

My rating 4.5 of 5 stars