A newspaper article brings back to the public spotlight an infamous story and sets up what the main plot of the novel will tell us, that in the Suffolk hamlet of Wakenhyrst, Edmund Stearne, historian and academic, killed a worker at his manor house home of Wake’s End in 1913. The framing story begins, not in Edwardian Britain in 1906, but instead in 1966. Michelle Paver began her career writing young adult novels ( Chronicles of Ancient Darkness series (2004 – 2009), beginning with Wolf Brother) but more recently her adult novels ( Dark Matter, Thin Air) have blazed a trail on the adult creepy side. Wakenhyrst is a novel that taps into this tradition, steeped in folklore, with strange things going on and odd characters. The Gothic novel is one of the classic genre tropes of our genre – think Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, or more recently Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House or even Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black.
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