Wakenhyrst

Product Information

The gulf between these two existences was vast. There was no in-between. Either he was a murderer, or he was not. The journals of painter and historian Edmund Stearne have been kept safely in Wake’s End since his admittance to an asylum for the criminally insane. He admitted he did it but that he never did anything wrong. 60 years later, his daughter releases his, and her, story to the world. A highly successful children’s author, Michelle Paver actually began by writing novels for adults and has hollowed out a niche for herself in gothic stories for grownups, set at the beginning of the 20th century. Months after reading it, I remain obsessed with Michelle Paver’s Wakenhyrst… Spooky, twisted and unforgettable” In Edwardian Suffolk, a manor house stands alone in a lost corner of the Fens: a glinting wilderness of water whose whispering reeds guard ancient secrets. Maud is a lonely child growing up without a mother, ruled by her repressive father.

Wakenhyrst: : Michelle Paver: Head of Zeus

Concise and intense, filled with references to the tradition of English ghost stories, Paver’s novel succeeds on a number of levels. Her fen, “alive with vast skeins of geese… the last stretch of the ancient marshes that once drowned the whole of East Anglia”, casts “a dim green subaqueous glimmer” over her story; Maud, poised between superstition and religion, is inexorably drawn to it. “‘Don’t you nivver go near un,’” she’s told by her hated nurse. “‘If’n you do, the ferishes and hobby-lanterns ull hook you in to a miry death.” Like all good heroines, Maud doesn’t listen. Maud’s father’s discovery of an unsettling, grotesque painting of devils marks a shift in life at Wake’s End. Always a controlling, but logical, man, Edmund Stearne has changed since first setting eyes on the painting—and Maud notices. Paranoid and erratic, Edmund’s work as a historian comes to intersect with the history of the painting—the Doom—and his obsession becomes Maud’s mission to understand. The life of Alice Pyett, a woman who claimed God spoke through her centuries ago, has absorbed him as the focus of his work, but now her diary entries, which Edmund is translating and which readers are able to read, fuel his own paranoia. Through firsthand journal entries, readers—and Maud—come to know Edmund’s thoughts intimately as he faces what he fears he set loose in discovering the Doom. Something ancient, something uncontrollable, something evil. The atmosphere and folklore of the fens comes to life, the utterly compelling story unfolding in a way that is impossible to look away from. There are secrets at Wake’s End and secrets her father keeps and Maud will have them unraveled before her. But as the story unfolds, not all is clear; is it madness or is history repeating itself? Is Edmund paranoid or has something actually been wakened? Is there truth to the local superstitions of the Fens? Though a quietly told tale, Wakenhyrst rises to a thrilling crescendo that is unsettling and surprising. Wakenhyrst is a gothic style horror set in the fens of East Anglia. While the characters are fictional, much of the story is based on real historical accounts; the delirious writings of a spiritualist, the disturbing paintings of asylum inmates, and the doom, a religious mural depicting the Day of Judgement.

Time heals old wounds and dissipates old illusions as a new generation of Caskeys ascends to power. Maud’s battle has begun. She must survive a world haunted by witchcraft, the age-old legends of her beloved fen – and the even more nightmarish demons of her father’s past.

Wakenhyrst - Goodreads Books similar to Wakenhyrst - Goodreads

Like Alice, Maman had never been allowed to do anything; she’d always had things done to her. She had been ‘given in marriage’ and ‘permitted’ fine clothes – although only if Father approved of them. Wakenhyrst combines elements of all the things I adore, medieval history and religious imagery, the Anglo-Saxon language, the unromantic beauty of the East-Anglian marshes, gothic themes, visceral horror, and the astute exploration of gender and class issues in Edwardian Britain.In the gripping new novel by the author of The Fourteenth Letter, a lawyer in Victorian London must find a man he got off a murder charge - and who seems to have killed again . . . Maud’s battle has begun. She must survive a world haunted by witchcraft, the age-old legends of her beloved fen – and the even more nightmarish demons of her father’s past. Maud's battle has begun. She must survive a world haunted by witchcraft, the age-old legends of her beloved fen – and the even more nightmarish demons of her father's past.

Wakenhyrst by Michelle Paver - review: some sinister

To her the fen was a forbidden realm of magical creatures and she longed for it with a hopeless passion. Wakenhyrst is a framed narrative set in Edwardian Suffolk, at the Sterne family’s ancestral marshland home of Wakes End. The story follows the life of Maud Sterne and her account of the mysterious events leading up to a gruesome murder committed by her father. We see Maud mature into adulthood while simultaneously watching her father, Edmund, descend into madness. Maud loves the fen and feels at home wandering its watery wilderness. However her father is scared of it, his guilt manifesting in his paranoia. The pervasive marsh smell starts to haunt him as he becomes more and more obsessed with the rantings of Alice Pyett, ironically a female spiritualist. It’s gripping and tense, and my favourite Michelle Paver book by far. In an additional similarity to Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, the element of the supernatural in Wakenhyrst is never made explicit – instead only making an appearance in the character’s dreams and visions. This appears to serve multiple functions, largely to make obvious Edmund Stearne’s poor grasp on reality, to illuminate the ludicrous religious and superstitious phenomena experienced by the inhabitants of Wakenhyrst, but also so as not to undermine the stark, natural power of The Fens. I really enjoyed the elements of folk-horror Paver used in the novel. Images of swamp demons with wide mouths and frog-like eyes, impish creatures with swampy green horns, they paint a very different picture to the antiquated Christian red-skinned devils so often depicted in medieval dooms.She must survive a world haunted by witchcraft, the age-old legends of her beloved fen – and the even more nightmarish demons of her father’s past. The most impressive nov­el of the year. It’s an utter triumph of a book, a pitch-perfect evocation of the stories of M.R. James and A.C. Benson filtered through a 21st-century sensibility. One of my favourite things about Wakenhyrst is that it uses a distinctive medieval European depiction of nature, in this instance, the Suffolk Fens. The Fens are presented to us as this wild, unromantic, untamed space that transcends social boundaries (see Sir Gawain and the Green Knight or Marie de France’s Lanval). Even Wakes End’s patriarch, Edmund Sterne, with all the power that his status and gender affords, is at the mercy of the marsh. Only in this space can Maud be her true self, unrestricted by the social expectations of a landowner’s daughter. Only here can she pursue a romance with the working-class under-gardener, only amongst the mud and reeds can she exist without being sexualised or undermined for being a woman. The Suffolk Fens are to Wakenhyrst what the Yorkshire moors are to Wuthering Heights, the feral beauty of the marsh is to Maud Sterne what the unbridled heathland is to Catherine Earnshaw.

Wakenhyrst’ by Michelle Paver – We Women of Horror ‘Wakenhyrst’ by Michelle Paver – We Women of Horror

Starting with her 2010 novel, Dark Matter, and continuing with 2016’s Thin Air, Paver has been writing ghost stories distinguished by their vividly evoked settings and the struggles of their protago­nists. Wakenhyrst is a more-than-worthy addition to their ranks.” Speaking of ludicrous phenomena, I really enjoyed how Paver explores the similarity between the practises of Maud’s religious father, and the superstitious practices of the villagers and house staff. Edmund rebukes the superstitions of the common folk, yet practises not only religious customs but also carries a hagstone, renowned by locals to ward off bad spirits (though he claims that he keeps it simply as a childhood memento). Maud highlights the hypocrisy of the ‘rules’ each side enforces: “What made these two sets of rules so dangerous was that you got punished if you mixed them up, but you couldn’t always tell what kind of rule it was. If you spilled salt, you had to toss a pinch over your left shoulder; but was that to bind the devil…or was it because Judas Iscariot spilled salt at the last supper?” As in Dark Matter, Paver manages the balance between outright supernaturalism and the suggestion that the horrors are psychological in origin with great skill. It is more difficult to pull this off at novel-length than in a short story, and harder now than it was 100 years ago, but she succeeds. Revisiting M R James territory with a modern feminist sensibility, Wakenhyrst is weirdly compelling.”

A gripping ghost story… This is a brilliantly atmospheric read (be warned: it’s also terrifying!) with a brave, forward-thinking heroine I loved.” Maud’s a fantastic character. As she reads her father’s journal, her opinion of him changes rapidly and she starts to subtly annoy him on purpose. She saves and befriends a magpie, hence the cover, and she strikes up a friendship with the handsome gardener, someone below her station as far as her father is concerned. Through this it highlights the power imbalance caused by poverty. An unforgettable, surrealist gothic folk-thriller with commercial crossover appeal from a brilliant new voice.