WAKENHYRST

Michelle Paver

medieval mystic. At the beginning she’s proud of her work, but one day she comes upon his diary and finds out he didn’t want to pay for a secretary, so he’s only using her. She also uncovers a murder committed by her father when he was a kid.

She knew no one in Ely who would help her. Priests, aldermen, physicians, attorneys: to a man, they would declare that she was ill and send her back to Father. The police were also out of the question. Maud had only the vaguest notion of what policemen actually did, but she knew that her sort of people never had anything to do with them.

Edmund starts to imagine there’s a demon on the loose, and after him; and his duty as a is to banish said demon from this world, no matter what it takes. He starts reading books on exorcism, he thinks God is testing him by sending something to haunt him and his property.

All of the sudden, he starts to make changes in his household, the windows must be closed at all times, there must be a line of salt next to every door, no animals nor plants can be near the house, only allowing Solomon’s Seal to grow, as it is used as a protective charm and in witchcraft.

A

song

That Reminds Me

of the book: In the Woods Somewhere- Hozier

Another gothic book, set in Wake’s End, a large and wealthy manor, in the middle of Guthlaf’s fen. It is owned by scholar Edmund Stearne, a very religious man, but also really authoritarian and abusive. The history is told by his self-educated teenage daughter, Maud. She slowly starts to realize her father is not a saint, as he doesn’t care for his wife’s health, since she keeps having miscarriages and still births, but he insists that she should continue to pay her marital debt; this ends with her death.

After Maud’s mother dies, she finds herself as her father’s secretary, in charge of typewriting his research work about a local

On the other hand, Maud is in love with the fen and everything within, the trees, the lake, the animals, and slowly, she also falls in love with Clem, the manor’s gardener, but being the owner’s daughter, their romance is forbidden; meanwhile, her father has an affair with one of the cooks, so Maud starts to see there’s a double standard between woman and man, and classes.

When she finds out her father thinks the devil is inside her brother and her lover, she decides it is time to fight back. Unfortunately, since society dismisses and threatens her, she has to fight her father alone; she only saves her brother, Edmund kills Clem, and he ends up in a psychiatric hospital. We may never know for sure if God was testing him or if he actually banished evil from earth, we only know that in his hallucinations, he killed two people.

As she lay in bed it occurred to her that between religion and superstition there was no difference, since both were based on unreason. To kill a man to redeem the sins of others was as irrational as tapping a hole in one’s eggshell to stop a witch using it as a boat. […]She thought, this church was built in the years after the Black Death had killed a third of the people. It was built out of fear. It’s a bribe to God: Please don’t do it again.