the full review can be found here:

https://nordie.wordpress.com/2017/04/04/book-review-the-hidden-people-by-alison-...

the full review can be found here:

https://nordie.wordpress.com/2017/04/04/book-review-the-hidden-people-by-alison-...

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With such a gorgeous cover and an intriguing synopsis, I was super excited to read The Hidden People by Alison Littlewood. Slow to build, the pacing was problematic enough that it knocked the rating down two stars to three. Other than the pacing, the characters and story itself were absolutely fantastic! An amazing mystery that messes with your mind and keeps you wondering what is happening from start to end.

The characters were extremely interesting and well developed. The narrator was fantastic and reminded me of Edgar Allan Poe's narrators in which they are strong of conviction and slowly begin to wonder if they are slowly giving in to madness or if madness is suddenly invading the real world. Leading him to wonder whether he is going insane is his wife Helena and her erratic behavior. While I know her behavior was altered to make the reader and narrator wonder whether she was herself or a fae changeling, it didn't seem to make sense at the end, with the explanations given after everything unravels. I can't go into it further without getting into spoilers so I'll leave it at that. Mrs. Gomersal is perfect at her role as well, just so well developed and complex.

The story itself is great and leaves you as a reader confused and constantly wondering what is happening. Are changelings real? Are they not? What is happening? Then once the reveal happens, everything clicks and you realize what a fool you were for not seeing it earlier. It was incredibly well thought out and put together.

Pacing, however, was a big issue for this book. It didn't pick up for me until around the 50% mark. It was a big hurdle. I kept having to push myself to keep going, telling myself it would pick up. It did, but if I hadn't stuck with it, I would never have known have great it was in the end.

The Hidden People by Alison Littlewood has fantastic characters and plot, but with troubling pacing, it will take a dedicated reader to reach the payoff.

// I voluntarily reviewed a complimentary copy of this title. //
( )

Boy howdy, was that a stinker to get through! I've never known the last hour and a half on a Kindle read take so long. The premise was promising, and when I finally finished the thing, perhaps skim-reading a few pages along the way, the ending was better than I'd hoped, but the story was so slow. I read in another review that this is like a Thomas Hardy novel - which I have never read in any shape or form, and I'm now in no hurry to start - but Hardy's novels were contemporary. Alison Littlewood's pompous prig of a narrator and obsession with dandelion clocks are just interminably dull.

I think the greatest fault with the story is Albie Mirralls, said narrator. If the reader is meant to hate him and find him both insufferably arrogant and pathetic, then bravo, Miss Littlewood, but I could not stand him! I was hoping that his puffed up, middle class twittering would be broken up with chapters from other characters' perspectives - LIzzie or Mary Gomersal or anybody from Yorkshire who didn't talk like they had a stick up their bum - but no. Albie all the way. Joy. That coupled with his unlikely motivation and then obsession with his north country cousin - he meets her once at the Great Exhibition and then promptly forgets about her until he hears of her death, but suddenly he must dedicate his life to solving her murder and defending her honour? - made for a flimsy set-up, but I was hoping that the drama would build after the gruesome description of Lizzie's burned body. Nope. Instead we get a lot of descriptions of the countryside - gotta love those dandelion clocks! - and how hot the summer weather is.

Then Albie's equally middle class wife Helena turns up, and blames him for dragging her there when he hasn't thought twice about her. Helena's personality, if she has one, changes to conveniently fit the backstory of Lizzie's death, and I presume the reader is supposed to start thinking 'Is she possessed by some supernatural entity or is she just hysterical?' a la The Turn of the Screw, etc, but her behaviour was so melodramatic that I didn't actually care. Why is he obsessed with a woman he met once? Why did she follow him to Yorkshire instead of running in the opposite direction? Meh.

The Yorkshire characters in the weirdly Wicker Man village of Halfoak were actually quite interesting, in a 'Don't stray from the path!' way (mixing my movies, but you get the point), but they can't wrest the story from bloody Albie and his smugly narrow-minded opinions. There's a neat little mystery shrouded in superstition - based on the death of Bridget Cleary - but the plot is so badly paced and the main characters so unlikable that only after finishing the book does the whole story come together. But by that point, I was too relieved to want to go back and start again! ( )

The mid-Victorian Gothic novel, Byronic Romanticism and the 'Female Gothic' appear to be alive and well in the carefully crafted pages of Alison Littlewood's THE HIDDEN PEOPLE. It's an elegantly crafted novel that plays wonderfully with 21st century psychological horror themes, while simultaneously conjuring up the literary spectres of both Arthur Machen and Emily Bronte, and then wrapping them within the superficial framework of The Wicker Man. It's one hell of a juggling act, yet Littlewood never drops even a single ball.

The use of language is simply brilliant, whether in terms of grounding time and place (1862 Yorkshire) or in building a deceptively effective sense of dread, the usage is 'pastiche perfect' across the board. The plot is relatively simple: Young Albie Millais met his lovely and intriguing cousin, Lizzie, at the Crystal Palace, some ten years previously and is now disturbed to find she has suddenly died a grisly death at the hands of her husband, who believed she had been taken by the Fair Folk and replaced with a changeling, so newly married Albie heads to the rural village of Halfoak to handle funeral arrangements and look into the circumstances surrounding her death. What this rational, if all too socially proper, young man finds is a village utterly in thrall to ancient superstitions. While this easily could have devolved into a basic rational vs. supernatural story, there is considerably more depth at work, in that Littlewood also manages to engage in questions surrounding gender roles and the inherent restrictions in a patriarchal society and the seemingly transgressive approach taken by women looking to make their way within it. Add to that the dichotomy of thought and behaviour between rural and city folk, plus the same again with class distinctions, as well as the war between rational and irrational thought processes, to say little of the power of belief, and that simplicity of plot expands into a richly layered and surprisingly deep, and largely satisfying, read.

My only niggles with the book are in respect to the climax and denouement, both of which seemed less adroitly handled than the lead up. In this instance that translates to the difference between a 4 and 5 star rating, so not even close to a deal breaker. Still, a truly fine read, particularly for those who enjoy the twisted intricacies of a Victorian Gothic. Quite frankly, this is an impressive work.

If you enjoyed this novel, hunt up a copy of Littlewood's recent novella COTTINGLEY. It's a very tight and atmospheric work and mines a similar, if more traditional, vein. ( )