My Review
I’ve never read anything else by Wendy Webb (although my Kindle tells me I have a few of her other books already, so I better get reading), so I wasn’t sure what to think of this one when I bought it. Amazon recommended it to me as a new release and I have to say, I was pretty intrigued – and since it’s fall, I like to stock up on creepy sounding horror and thriller novels, so I ordered it and added it to my pile. A week later I decided to start it, because the synopsis sounded so good I couldn’t put it off any longer – I had to read The Stroke of Winter!
Tess has moved into her family’s old home, the one that was owned by her grandparents and her parents. She has taken over, and plans to create a bed and breakfast in the sleepy, cold northern town. She decides to do this over the winter, so that when the summer rolls around and tourists visit, she will be all set.
The first thing she wants to do is open up a shuttered area of the house that has been closed off her whole life – her grandmother closed it off and kept it that way. Tess has sworn she has been hearing scratching and sounds coming from inside that area, but how would that be possible? Was there an animal in there?
“It was almost as if, the nearer people are to the other side, whether they’ve just come into the world or are close to leaving it, the more sleep they need. And she wondered, too, if it was really sleep at all. If it wasn’t simply their way of touching what was behind the veil. Infants reaching back to where they had been. Seniors reaching forward to where they were soon going.”
With the help of some local townsfolk, Tess manages to get the room open. What she finds inside is quite a surprise – an artist’s studio that has remained untouched for years – since her grandfather, a famous painter, was alive. She also finds five unseen paintings (that she estimates to be worth millions). But something is different about these paintings…something that seems more disturbed and darker than her grandfather’s other paintings.
As the mystery unfolds, Tess is determined to get to the bottom of why the room was closed up, as well as what secret the paintings hold. Plagued with strange dreams and uneasy feelings in the house, Tess relies on the townsfolk to help her solve the problem, and rid the studio – and her home – of the unsettled.
So the first thing I noticed about The Stroke of Winter is that the book starts off kind of slow. And it remains kind of slow until about after the first forty percent, I would say. It definitely has quite the slow-build. But it isn’t boring or anything – just highly detailed. The author goes on to create this amazing world and describes the setting of the town in a lot of detail, so you are getting a truly fleshed-out setting. That’s not a bad thing, I just kind of hoped for a bit more action (or horror, maybe?) from the start. Sure, there are some creepy bits tossed in here and there but it wasn’t quite what I was hoping for. Again – not necessarily a bad thing!
Since the pacing is slow, it allowed for quite the build-up of tension throughout the book. I’m glad for that – I like a nice slow build up when it comes to horror – too much in-your-face terror kind of writing in the beginning of the book will kind of numb you to the rest of the book, so I’m glad for a slow build. However, it was kind of like the pacing was too rushed in the end. The middle of the book was Tess going around and trying to solve the mystery, but when she finally did, the way everything fell into place seemed kind of anti-climactic. I think the story itself was too much of a budding romance novel and not enough of a horror/thriller that I anticipated it, but that’s not the author’s fault – like I said, I haven’t read any of her other work so I’m unable to gauge her overall writing style.
I guess I was hoping for a bit more jump scares than the book had to offer, but I must say the mystery aspect of The Stroke of Winter is quite appealing, and the author does an amazing job creating a story that draws you in.
Overall, I’m happy to have read this one – I have such a special spot in my heart for haunted hotels/inns, so I’m always up for books with that type of setting!