Yeeg.
What we have here is a creepy young girl in a creepy English seaside village that is being eaten, bit by bit, by the sea itself. Rebecca has been dumped by her friends back home -- specifically, her boyfriend -- in the wake of an awful tragedy in which her policeman father played a part. Rebecca, hurting and isolated and vulnerable, is befriended by local weirdo Ferelith, who is channeling some pretty awful ancient evil about the place. Rusty sharp things come into play.

I love Sedgwick's writing and find him to be a first-rate mood-setter, but this book was slightly disappointing compared with My Swordhand is Singing and The Foreshadowing. Still a strong thriller, though, and unsettling after the book is closed. ( )

Teen fiction; dark horror/mystery. Winterfold is a small, bleak English town that is slowly falling off the edge of a cliff as the sea continues to wear away the ever changing coastline. The town's history is centuries old, and its dark, deadly secrets unravel slowly, as told through three alternating and intertwining narratives. Rebecca, a London teenager hoping to escape public scrutiny, takes refuge with her father here. Ferelith, a troubled local girl who is obsessed with death and the afterlife, becomes instantly attracted to Rebecca. And an unnamed rector from the late 18th century, the evidence of whose unspeakable sins will eventually be unearthed and discovered by the two girls at the novel's close. Marcus Sedgwick, who also wrote the acclaimed Revolver, is a master of suspense but it does take some patience to stick with the story until it "gets good," especially with the archane, riddling language of the third narrator. ( )

I felt like I was watching one of those horror movies where you keep waiting and waiting for something really scary to happen, but it never does. Disappointing. ( )

A couple of really scary scenes, but overall not quite as scary as I expected. Still, a quick, fun and spooky read. A Cybils 2011 nominee. ( )

When you pick up a new Marcus Sedgwick book you never know what to expect from the author as he has become a master of surprises and loves to keep his readers guessing as to what twist or turn his story will take next. And yet again he took this reader completely by surprise - this book was totally different from what I had expected, and all the better for it.

The story is told from three different points of view. There is Rebecca, daughter of a policeman who has taken the pair of them off to a small seaside town for the summer; we are not initially informed what he is trying to escape from, but this is revealed as the story progresses. Next there is Ferelith, a seemingly friendless, and certainly eccentric local girl who appears to be very keen to befriend Rebecca, a notion that the new girl in town initially resists. The third voice is one from the past, written as the journal of the local rector back in the 17th Century. For me the story as told by the two girls flowed well, with tantalising snippets of information being revealed as the story progressed. However, even though it sometimes interrupted the flow of the modern day story, the Rector's journal is the device that really got my mind whirring, and made me start trying to fill in pieces of the main story, often with an intense feeling of creeping dread.

This is one hell of a creepy story, but not the kind that will necessarily appeal to fans of the more gory aspects of horror. Although there are some bloody moments, the real scares in this book are purely psychological, so if you like your horror to really play on the primal fears that lay buried deep in your mind then this book is most definitely for you. And the character of Ferelith is one of the principle causes for this. Right from the first time we meet her we know there is something not quite right about her; her mind obviously does not work in quite the same way as your average teenage girl's, but these differences, that initially seem like eccentricities, soon had me knowing that she is not the kind of person I would like to turn my back on. This strangeness in her personality adds a wonderful amount of suspense to the story, as we constantly wonder whether Rebecca is actually safe in her company. In addition to this her character also ensures that element of unpredictability that I so love in Marcus Sedgwick's storytelling.

To say much more would be to give too much away about this story. It is a dark gothic mystery, with an intelligence that will really make you think. It requires reading in as few sittings as possible, but maybe not when you are alone on a dark cold night; if you do then you may not get much sleep that night - elements of this story played on my mind and entered my dreams for some days after I finished it, and even now, some time later, writing this review has brought back some slightly uncomfortable memories of the truly chilling ending to the story: Ferelith is a character that could haunt me for some time to come. ( )