Must Read Monday is a weekly thing I do here to recommend books I’ve read and enjoyed. I might sometimes throw in something I gave 3 stars to, but for the most part they’re books I gave a 4-5 star rating to. That doesn’t mean they’re necessarily amazing literature, but it does mean I liked them enough to recommend them to other people.
The Winter People by Jennifer McMahon
When I read it: January 2017
Genres: horror; mystery/thriller; paranormal
Recommended for: Fans of ghost stories and the kind of horror that slowly builds a creep factor. Think M.R. James’s ghost stories, or movies like Insidious, Dead Silence, Oculus, etc.
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What it’s about:West Hall, Vermont, has always been a town of strange disappearances and old legends. The most mysterious is that of Sara Harrison Shea, who, in 1908, was found dead in the field behind her house just months after the tragic death of her daughter, Gertie. Now, in present day, nineteen-year-old Ruthie lives in Sara’s farmhouse with her mother, Alice, and her younger sister, Fawn. Alice has always insisted that they live off the grid, a decision that suddenly proves perilous when Ruthie wakes up one morning to find that Alice has vanished without a trace. Searching for clues, she is startled to find a copy of Sara Harrison Shea’s diary hidden beneath the floorboards of her mother’s bedroom. As Ruthie gets sucked deeper into the mystery of Sara’s fate, she discovers that she’s not the only person who’s desperately looking for someone that they’ve lost. But she may be the only one who can stop history from repeating itself.
I listened to the audiobook of this because the waiting list from the library was shorter, but I think that added to the experience of this book. It had a nice mystery mixed in with the horror, and an interesting twist. I felt so creeped out, like I was being watched, the entire time I was listening to it. If you’re a fan of that sort of thing, I definitely recommend the audiobook with headphones (bonus points for listening to it in the dark while you’re trying to sleep haha :P…not that I did that…ok, yeah, I totally did and it was great).
I’m a huge fan of horror movies, having been raised on them, and I’m honestly a little jaded now. It takes a lot for a horror movie to scare me, and I can count on one hand the number of books that have done the job. This one made the list, and I might actually invest in the audiobook even though I never buy audiobooks. It was that good.
I gave it 4-4.5/5 stars, and you can check out my review here if you want to know more about what I thought of it.
Have you read The Winter People, or any of Jennifer McMahon’s other books? If you have, what did you think? Advertisements Share this:
