However, it still has plenty to recommend it. I didn’t find this book nearly as scary as Paver’s earlier ventures into the supernatural – Dark Matter, the best modern horror story I’ve read, and Thin Air. The story Maud tells is one of Gothic horror, with at its heart the question – was Edmund driven mad by supernatural evil or are the evil things that happened a result of his existing madness?

But when for financial reasons she finally decides to open up, she chooses another recipient for the story – a young academic called Robin Hunter who has been researching Edmund’s paintings. Maud has lived an isolated existence in her childhood home since the tragedy and still doesn’t want to talk about it. Edmund spent many years in an asylum, painting demons, and has now died. No-one except Maud has ever known why he did it, and she has never spoken about it. One day he ran out of the house carrying a sharpened ice-pick and killed the first person he saw, and then went mad. The book starts in the ‘60s, when an elderly Maud is being pestered by a journalist to tell the story of the murder her father committed when she was young. But during the renovation of the local church, Edmund finds a medieval painting of the Last Judgement – the Wenhaston Doom – whitewashed over during the Reformation and he becomes obsessed with the demons portrayed on it.

Edmund Stearne, her father, is searching for a book rumoured to have been written by a medieval mystic, the Book of Alice Pyett. Her strict and domineering father doesn’t have much love or time for any of his children, especially his daughter, and her mother is almost permanently pregnant, though most of those pregnancies don’t come to term. Young Maud Stearne is a lonely child, growing up in an old house in the midst of the Suffolk fens in the early 20th century. It is a masterwork in the modern gothic tradition that ranges from Mary Shelley and Bram Stoker to Neil Gaiman and Sarah Perry.Medieval demons and Edwardian doom… 😀 😀 😀 😀 Wakenhyrst is an outstanding new piece of story-telling, a tale of mystery and imagination laced with terror. Spanning five centuries, Wakenhyrst is a darkly gothic thriller about murderous obsession and one girl's longing to fly free by the bestselling author of Dark Matter and Thin Air. 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. When he finds a painted medieval devil in a graveyard, unhallowed forces are awakened. Maud is a lonely child growing up without a mother, ruled by her repressive father. 'Something has been let loose.' 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. This sinister, gothic chiller shows why' BIG ISSUE, Books of the Year 2019. 'Paver is one of Britain's modern greats.

Wakenhyrst book review