S.J. Bolton excels at summoning up the claustrophobic atmosphere of rural village life. Her third novel, Blood Harvest, is her creepiest yet. The setting is a village on the remote Pennine moors in northern England, where the villagers still slaughter all their own meat in a “blood harvest” ritual, “bone men” are burned on All Souls’ Day and where a series of blonde little girls have gone missing in recent years. The Fletcher family, who have a beautiful fair-haired toddler of their own, Millie, are the newcomers who have “built their big, shiny new house on the crest of the moor, in a town that time seemed to have left to mind its own business” and — they should really have known better — in the middle of a graveyard.
At first, the children love their new home, but soon they start to hear voices from behind the gravestones and to glimpse a little girl with long hair and “something very wrong with her face” — initially in the church grounds, but then watching them while they sleep. “‘Millie. Millie fall,’” she tells 10-year-old Tom in the middle of the night; he’s terrified about his little sister’s safety. Concerned he’s showing symptoms of schizophrenia, his parents send him to Evi, a psychiatrist with a bad leg and a pugilistic attitude who is the damaged heroine of this new Bolton book.
Harry, the new vicar, isn’t so sure Tom’s wrong. He’s heard strange voices echoing around the church as well, and a series of events — blood in the communion wine, a smashed model of Millie on the church floor — point
to the fact that newcomers
aren’t all that welcome in the village of Heptonclough. Then Millie goes missing.
It’s a dramatic setup that in the hands of a less skilled plotter might have failed to satisfy, but Bolton keeps up the pace to the end. Her short chapters and perspective switches are classic thriller fare, but she uses them adeptly to deliver a mystery that twines its way to the secretive, rotten heart of the village and its skeletons (literal and metaphorical). This author doesn’t need gruesome murder descriptions and gritty urban streets to ratchet up the fear; the unexceptional, small-town family life of Britain is her palette and she uses it to chilling, menacing effect. Just don’t plan a trip to the Pennines after finishing Blood Harvest.
In the mainstream view, the Philippines should be worried that a conflict over Taiwan between the superpowers will drag in Manila. President Ferdinand Marcos Jr observed in an interview in The Wall Street Journal last year, “I learned an African saying: When elephants fight, the only one that loses is the grass. We are the grass in this situation. We don’t want to get trampled.” Such sentiments are widespread. Few seem to have imagined the opposite: that a gray zone incursion of People’s Republic of China (PRC) ships into the Philippines’ waters could trigger a conflict that drags in Taiwan. Fewer
March 18 to March 24 Yasushi Noro knew that it was not the right time to scale Hehuan Mountain (合歡). It was March 1913 and the weather was still bitingly cold at high altitudes. But he knew he couldn’t afford to wait, either. Launched in 1910, the Japanese colonial government’s “five year plan to govern the savages” was going well. After numerous bloody battles, they had subdued almost all of the indigenous peoples in northeastern Taiwan, save for the Truku who held strong to their territory around the Liwu River (立霧溪) and Mugua River (木瓜溪) basins in today’s Hualien County (花蓮). The Japanese
Pei-Ru Ko (柯沛如) says her Taipei upbringing was a little different from her peers. “We lived near the National Palace Museum [north of Taipei] and our neighbors had rice paddies. They were growing food right next to us. There was a mountain and a river so people would say, ‘you live in the mountains,’ and my friends wouldn’t want to come and visit.” While her school friends remained a bus ride away, Ko’s semi-rural upbringing schooled her in other things, including where food comes from. “Most people living in Taipei wouldn’t have a neighbor that was growing food,” she says. “So
Whether you’re interested in the history of ceramics, the production process itself, creating your own pottery, shopping for ceramic vessels, or simply admiring beautiful handmade items, the Zhunan Snake Kiln (竹南蛇窯) in Jhunan Township (竹南), Miaoli County, is definitely worth a visit. For centuries, kiln products were an integral part of daily life in Taiwan: bricks for walls, tiles for roofs, pottery for the kitchen, jugs for fermenting alcoholic drinks, as well as decorative elements on temples, all came from kilns, and Miaoli was a major hub for the production of these items. The Zhunan Snake Kiln has a large area dedicated