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.
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