Winterwood

Fans of the unreliable narration, snappy language, and horror-beneath-the-surface that made Patrick McCabe's The Butcher Boy so cool will certainly enjoy his new novel, Winterwood.

Winterwood tells the story of Redmond Hatch and his love gone wrong. Redmond returns to the mountain village of his youth and meets Ned Strange, a local fiddler and keeper of tradition. While Ned seems like a genial old mountain man, that's far from the truth.

The book's dust jacket proclaims "not since Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian has there been a story of such horror combined with writing of such beauty." While I wouldn't go quite that far to make such a comparison, McCabe is certainly an immense talent and Winterwood an interesting addition to his body of work.