There's a lot going in on Jennifer McMahon's 'The Winter People' and it seems to have touched some readers especially closely. It's a quick enough read, full of effortlessly smooth prose, and I enjoyed it well enough, but there are people who absolutely swear by this book to the level of it being their favourite book ever. I wonder if they connect to it personally, perhaps because it's a book about loss and they've experienced major losses of their own. Maybe it inherently speaks more to women, because of their closer connection to motherhood.

Initially, it's a historical horror novel, presented as the diary of Sarah Harrison Shea, found and published by her niece, Amelia Larkin. She's a product of the 19th century and she lived in West Hall, Vermont, where she ran a farm with her husband Martin. It's a quintessential location for a horror novel, rural and remote and with a darkly named landmark behind it, a rock formation called the Devil's Hand. No wonder folk tales grew out of that location, in particular that of the sleepers, whom Sara wrote about in her diary. They only became more powerful when Sara was murdered in 1908, an event that built its own urban legends.

I'm not sure how old she is at that point, beyond being a wife and mother, but she saw her first sleeper at the age of nine, a local girl called Hester Jameson, who had died of typhoid a couple of weeks earlier. It would appear that her mother Cora, somehow found a way to bring her back from the dead. That's a promising folk horror setup for a rural novel, one that likely takes fans of horror back through Stephen King's 'Pet Sematary' to the old story of 'The Monkey's Paw'. It seems fair to suggest that here's where we would expect a skip into the present but McMahon chooses to deepen the past instead.

Sara's own daughter is named Gertie and she dreams of the Winter People, perhaps something she inherited through blood, as Sara's aunt is some sort of wise woman. Sure enough, one day she wanders off and they eventually find her body at the bottom of a well. Guess what happens next! Well, there's another detail worth mentioning and that's to do with a ring, one that Sara clearly recognises when her husband says he found it in a field behind the farm and asks him, in no uncertain terms, to bury again. Of course, he doesn't even though he says he did, and maybe that played a part in Gertie's death.

It's here that McMahon brings us forward in time to the present day, when Ruthie Washburne lives in the very same house with her mother and much younger sister Fawn. Ruthie's nineteen and her dad died a couple of years earlier, continuing the theme of loss. Everybody in this book seems to have lost somebody, whether to death, divorce or more literally, to a game of hide and seek. Fawn is six and is very good at hiding from her sister inside the house, which is old and full of great hiding spots. However, when their mum, Alice, who's practically living off the grid, goes missing, they find themselves searching for more of them, in case they hold clues.

They find some in mum's room. For one, the closet has been deliberately blocked from opening. For two, there's a secret compartment under the rug that contains a gun and a pair of wallets belonging to strangers. And for three, there's also Sara's diary in hardback. That connects the two eras and introduces elements of mystery, bringing us into Jaime Jo Wright territory, even though we don't strictly alternate chapters set in the past with those set in the present. After all, we spent the first fifty pages in the past and McMahon alternates periods in similarly large chunks rather than mere chapters.

Instead, she alternates chapters between the two primary present day characters and Ruthie is only one. The other is Katherine, who isn't from West Hall but has been drawn there through a loss and mystery of her own. She was married to Gary and they had a son Austin, whom they lost to leukemia a couple of years earlier. Now she's lost Gary, first metaphorically then literally, as he died in a car accident. He was a photographer supposedly on a photo shoot in Cambridge but he crashed returning from West Hall, his credit card last used to pay for a meal there. She can't believe he was cheating on her so goes there herself to investigate.

The central theme here revolves around loss and especially what we do when we're confronted with it. Ruthie and Fawn have literally lost their mum, inexplicably so because she was there in their house and their lives until she wasn't any more and they struggle to figure out where she might be. Of course, this is especially tough because they're still mourning their dad. Katherine started to lose her husband after he bought some old photos at an antiques store along with a ring that he gave to her, may or may not have been losing him to another woman and then lost him to death. Both Ruthie and Katherine now have copies of Sara's diary, which talks about her loss of a daughter but also about sleepers, a folk tale that offers a way to bring people back.

There are plenty more examples of loss in this book as these characters search for answers and the dots I'm sure you've already connected in the paragraph above are joined by plenty more. I haven't even introduced you to Candace yet. Needless to say, she's suffered her own loss, as her husband has left her, and, needless to say, her story connects with Ruthie and Katherine too, as a supporting player in their respective stories. Everything connects here, because 'The Winter People' is a cross-generational jigsaw of a novel. Even when we figure out this little mystery or maybe that one, it adds another and the worst thing I can say about the book is that it doesn't wrap all of them up with the same degree of neatness.

As you might expect, that makes this a mystery, or a set of them, as much as a horror novel. The theme of loss connects to all of us, because we've all lost someone or something important, be it a parent or a child, a lover or a pet, maybe even just a friend. The ultimate question that the book asks us is how far we would go if we were given a magic undo button. Would we use it and bring our loved one back? And would we change that answer if we were shown the rules of how that magic undo button works and we read the small print and see all the catches and caveats? Maybe here's where mothers might answer differently.

And yes, that's where the true horror comes in. Loss is horrific enough and being shown such a cast of characters, all of whom have dealt with or are still dealing with loss, would render this a horror novel of a sort. However, when you factor in the supernatural angle, that ratchets up the opportunities for horror; even though McMahon resists the urge to rely on cheap thrills. There are a couple of scenes that go beyond the general feel of quiet horror, but, even as I read them, I imagined how a whole slew of other horror authors would have leaned into them far more.

McMahon apparently tends to write suspense novels rather than outright horror, but it's easy to see why horror fans gravitated to 'The Winter People' too. Sure, it should play best to those open to quiet horror, but loss is such a universal experience that it could affect anyone. It feels flip to suggest that it's more likely to connect with women than men but I think it's true. And it ought to work twice or three times as powerfully for women who have become mothers. ~~ Hal C F Astell