Synopsis – Mercy Booth isn’t afraid. The moors and Scarcross are her home and lifeblood. But, beneath her certainty, small things are beginning to trouble her. Three ancient coins missing from her father’s study, the shadowy figure out by the gatepost, an unshakeable sense that someone is watching – The Coffin Path
Author – Kathrine Clements
Genre – Horror | Gothic | Mystery
For fans of – Pride and Prejudice with Zombies, Hidden People, The House of a Hundred Whispers
The Coffin Path by Kathrine Clements transports the reader to a small sheep farm in seventeenth-century Yorkshire some twenty years after the English civil war, a place where the traumas of war still echo in the minds and actions of older characters and bleed down to the younger ones, in ways that don’t become fully apparent until the conclusion of the book.
The heroine, Mercy, is a tough and independent woman who has taken over the running of the farm due to her father’s faltering mental and physical health, doing what she needs to survive in this tough part of the world in a time when women were seen as just wives and mothers. This hard life for Mercy, though she finds faith in the work and even as strange and unexplained events start to happen around the farm, her faith that she’s following the right course never falters.
Clements crafts a plot containing a decent level of suspense, painting the Yorkshire moors as a bleak, rugged and isolated place where folklore and religion combine to breed fear and distrust. This is a part of the world a time when even the most simple of mishap can be mistaken for supernatural, leaving the characters and reader unsure of the Clements crafts a plot containing a decent level of suspense, painting the Yorkshire moors as a bleak, rugged and isolated place where folklore and religion combine to breed fear and distrust.
This is a part of the world a time when even the most simple of mishaps can be mistaken for supernatural, leaving the characters and reader unsure of the event’s true nature, right up until the very end and even then you still have doubts as to what was supernatural and what was caused by man.
I found The Coffin Path to be a great read, it has eerie suspense, well-written characters and an atmospheric setting, the only downside I found was the toned down horror elements stopped it from being truly great, I personally would have loved it if the final third, we found out if the land around the farm was rotten because of some insidious supernatural presence or if it was just years of deceit and pain that caused this series of events to play out just as they have. But overall, these are just minor gripes in an otherwise enjoyable read.
Roses Have Thoughts 