What follows is a story of disintegrating madness, revealed in Edmund Stearne’s notebook as the reporter persuades Maud to tell her story, going back to her childhood, when her mother was still alive. He spent the rest of his life in an asylum, where he created three paintings that astonished the world – grotesque paintings full of colour and tiny malevolent faces leering out of the canvas, the stuff of nightmares. He believes Edmund was innocent and hopes to discover the truth – was Edmund mad and what did he write in his notebook that Maud has never confirmed even existed? Maud’s e vidence was full of holes – did she commit the murder and frame her father, who took the blame?Įdmund never explained why he did it, or how he ended up in the well, screaming with terror as he fought off a mass of eels. But now she needs money to repair the ancient manor house that is her home and has invited the journalist to Wake’s End.
She is now a recluse and in 1913 she had only spoken briefly at his trial. The novel begins with a magazine report in 1966 on the events that took place at Wake’s End in 1913 when sixteen-year old Maud Stearne watched her father, Edmund, leave the house, armed with an ice-pick and a geological hammer and murder the first person he came across in the orchard.
It was a place of dread, haunted by spirits and the home of eels and other foul creatures. It’s set in a remote hamlet in the Suffolk Fens, an eerie waterlogged landscape where Edmund Stearn, a historian, and his family live in a large manor house, Wake’s End, on the edge of the Fens, said to be the oldest and most rotten of fens. It’s a slow-burner, told through different points of view, that builds to a climax with a sad twist in the story right at the end – one I hadn’t seen coming. Wakenhyrst by Michelle Paver is a dark and sinister tale, full of menace and suspense.
Head of Zeus|4 April 2019|e-book 5683 KB|Review copy|4* A tale of mystery and imagination laced with terror.
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