I've so much to say here, I hope I can get it all out.

First and foremost, this book...this damned book. It's incredible. After finishing McGregor's WASPS IN THE ICE CREAM I'd been looking for more from him. At the time, the bookstore was out of everything except this one, which I bought without even bothering to read the back.

I'm typically not too enamoured of historical settings, but in the last couple of months, I've been entranced by Brom's SLEWFOOT and even moreso by Alex Grecian's RED RABBIT but I have to say, of the three, this one absolutely grabbed me.

McGregor's strengths are all on display here:
His characters live and breath and settle into your heart as real people. I ached for Hester. And Will, for all of that. But every single character is finely crafted and carefully drawn. Which ties into one of McGregor's other strengths...don't come into one of his novels expecting slam bang action in the first three-quarters of the book. McGregor is an absolute master of slowly building both the story and the tension, building not with big bricks, but specifically chosen small stones, carefully fitted into place. You may think, as the reader, that he's overloading you with extraneous detail, but he's not. All that detail pays off. ALL of it. So, all those things you learn about the people, the town, their attitudes and their behaviours...your patience is rewarded.

And finally, there's the sheer storytelling ability of the author. Very much like  WASPS you'll feel very little horror in the first half, and only some in the third quarter. But that last bit? 

Damn.

Without spoiling anything, I will say that McGregor crafted—and I choose that word carefully, because this guy does magic with words that goes beyond writing—scenes that left me teared up, heartbroken. I went through one entire sequence, and it actually, honestly, hurt to swallow because I had a lump in my throat through the entire scene. Other scenes left my heart thudding in my chest. Several times, I know I whispered expletives, or things like, "oh no..."

There's books that are a great read. And I love those. I can examine the language, the style. They're a great experience.

But then there's books that go far beyond that. They become the reader's reality for a time. You slip out of your own life, and you fall into the world inside that book. That's a far more rare experience for me, but it happened here. I found myself two hundred years in the past, and I lived this book.

Why Tim McGregor doesn't have a major book deal and is lauded as one of the premiere authors of our time—not just a horror author, but an Author—is a mystery to me.

This is a brilliant book.