Maud’s father’s discovery of an unsettling, grotesque painting of devils marks a shift in life at Wake’s End. Always a controlling, but logical, man, Edmund Stearne has changed since first setting eyes on the painting—and Maud notices. Paranoid and erratic, Edmund’s work as a historian comes to intersect with the history of the painting—the Doom—and his obsession becomes Maud’s mission to understand. The life of Alice Pyett, a woman who claimed God spoke through her centuries ago, has absorbed him as the focus of his work, but now her diary entries, which Edmund is translating and which readers are able to read, fuel his own paranoia. Through firsthand journal entries, readers—and Maud—come to know Edmund’s thoughts intimately as he faces what he fears he set loose in discovering the Doom. Something ancient, something uncontrollable, something evil. The atmosphere and folklore of the fens comes to life, the utterly compelling story unfolding in a way that is impossible to look away from. There are secrets at Wake’s End and secrets her father keeps and Maud will have them unraveled before her. But as the story unfolds, not all is clear; is it madness or is history repeating itself? Is Edmund paranoid or has something actually been wakened? Is there truth to the local superstitions of the Fens? Though a quietly told tale, Wakenhyrst rises to a thrilling crescendo that is unsettling and surprising. Set at the turn of the nineteenth century, Maud is a nine-year old at the start of the novel and sixteen at the conclusion of her narrative, a girl on the cusp of adulthood in a world on the cusp of modernity, but still treated as a child of the Victorians by her father, the historian Edmund Stearne, and other patriarchal authority figure in society around her: the rector, Mr Broadstairs, and the doctor, Dr Grayson.

Wakenhyrst is a framed narrative set in Edwardian Suffolk, at the Sterne family’s ancestral marshland home of Wakes End. The story follows the life of Maud Sterne and her account of the mysterious events leading up to a gruesome murder committed by her father. We see Maud mature into adulthood while simultaneously watching her father, Edmund, descend into madness. The gulf between these two existences was vast. There was no in-between. Either he was a murderer, or he was not. Speaking of ludicrous phenomena, I really enjoyed how Paver explores the similarity between the practises of Maud’s religious father, and the superstitious practices of the villagers and house staff. Edmund rebukes the superstitions of the common folk, yet practises not only religious customs but also carries a hagstone, renowned by locals to ward off bad spirits (though he claims that he keeps it simply as a childhood memento). Maud highlights the hypocrisy of the ‘rules’ each side enforces: “What made these two sets of rules so dangerous was that you got punished if you mixed them up, but you couldn’t always tell what kind of rule it was. If you spilled salt, you had to toss a pinch over your left shoulder; but was that to bind the devil…or was it because Judas Iscariot spilled salt at the last supper?”

What we know from the beginning of the book is that one day, when Maude is 16 years old, her mother dead and gone, her father kills someone horribly, never denies having committed the murder either (but saying that he had to do it) and ending up in a well screaming himself half to death.

I loved the whole ‘upstairs, downstairs’ aspect of the story because due to tragic (frustrating circumstances) the Lady of the house, Maud’s mother, passes away early on. So she’s raised by her patriarchal, awful Father. Despite her Father’s strict rules and judgements–opinions on everything, she becomes her own woman. She builds relationships, explores the Fen, wanders the gardens…like some aspects of this story gave me serious, The Secret Garden vibes. At some point, Maud finds her Father’s journal entries and comes to understand him through his secret writings and of course, this is when things get JUICY!! I cannot express how absolutely delicious this book is. The mysterious happenings, the ever-changing relationship between Maud and her Father, a budding romance, Maud’s evolution into a young woman, elements of witchcraft and demonology…it’s a whole goddamn vibe. I soaked in it. I have been reading quite a lot of Gothic Fiction novels of late and finding my joy in most of them but Wakenhyrst just didn’t create the suspense or tension I was expecting. She helped Cole in the garden and he taught her how to put four seeds in every hole: One for the rook, one for the crow, one to rot and one to grow.”

Paver is a fantastic writer. The atmosphere she created was Gothic perfection—eerie, unsettling, full of the sense of long-kept secrets and the unknown. The novel’s structure and pacing, with the inclusion of both Edmund’s and Alice Pyett’s journal entries, was gripping. Maud was a captivating character whose experience and perspective enriched the story with something deeper than just the events of the plot—the desires and hopes of a young girl, the resistance to injustice that can come in so many small forms.