Over the Christmas period, I discovered an author by the name of Christina Henry. A pen name, she writes across two genres. Horror, and fairy tale retellings. I’ve read all ten of her books and will be doing three posts about them. This being the first.

Horseman

Everyone in Sleepy Hollow knows about the Horseman, but no one really believes in him. Not even Ben Van Brunt’s grandfather, Brom Bones, who was there when it was said the Horseman chased the upstart Crane out of town. Brom says that’s just legend, the village gossips talking.

More than thirty years after those storied events, the village is a quiet place. Fourteen-year-old Ben loves to play “Sleepy Hollow boys,” reenacting the events Brom once lived through. But then Ben and a friend stumble across the headless body of a child in the woods near the village, and the discovery makes Ben question everything the adults in Sleepy Hollow have ever said. Could the Horseman be real after all? Or does something even more sinister stalk the woods?

This was the first book of Christina’s that I read. An adaption, or retelling, of Sleepy Hollow, it centres around Ben Van Brunt, who we find out is a girl who hates dresses and longs to wear pants and play with the boys. She believes her grandmother hates her, but loves and adores her grandfather. They are raising her, as her parents, their son and daughter-in-law, both died when she was four. She senses something is wrong in the woods, and when boys are found headless, becomes more involved than she wants to be.

I really liked this retelling, not remembering the original Sleepy Hollow, and cried when her grandparents died. I was a put off by her “other grandfather”, one she didn’t know about. A sleezy mystical whatever, who killed the man who wanted to marry her grandmother. But as her grandfather said, he knew when he was eight, that he was going to marry her one day. She was six, mind you.

I am considering buying this book, but don’t really have the room for more. I did write a poem about the horseman, though.

I gave it 8/10

The Mermaid

Once there was a fisherman who lived on a cold and rocky coast and was never able to convince any woman to come away and live in that forbidding place with him. One evening he pulled up his net and found a woman in it. A woman with black hair and eyes as grey as a stormy sea and a gleaming fish’s tail instead of legs. The storm in her eyes rolled into his heart. She stopped her thrashing and crashing at his voice, though she did not understand his words. But her eyes had seen inside of him, and his loneliness caught her more surely than the net. So, she stayed with him, and loved him, though he grew old, and she did not. Remarks of this strange and unusual woman travelled from village to village and town to town, until they reached the ears of a man whose business was in the selling of the strange and unusual. His name was P.T. Barnum, and he’d been looking for a mermaid.

I found this story rather sad. She was a mermaid who found love with a human, as she could turn into human when she walked on land, and when he died she stayed in their cabin and gazed across the ocean waiting for him to return for over a decade, until Levi, PT Barnum’s lawyer, came along after rumours about a mermaid.

Eventually, she realises Jack’s not coming home, and decides she’s going to live the dream she once had. To see the world. So, she packs her one good dress and shoes into an oilskin bag, tucks what little money she had left after Jack died into a pocket in her dress, and swam for New York to make a contract with Barnum for six months to make more money to see the rest of the world. But before the contract is up, she’s had enough.

While an interesting concept, taking the showman, PT Barnum, and turning something that actually happened into a story, it ambled along. Once the telling of the love story between her and Jack was over in around ten pages, and around 50 years as he aged and died and she did not, the story of Ameila and PT starts.

The book ends with her swimming away from her second husband, Levi, to save her from being lynched in Charleston. As she’s a mermaid, PT’s been touring her around to make money as they have the contract. The story jumps four years, which annoyed me, for Levi to come and find her and their daughter on the island of Rarotonga.

Why four years? He hated water, and swimming, but four years to pack up their stuff and get on a boat for seven months?

The ending didn’t even mention this, just that he turned up on the island and she told their daughter it was her father. That was it. We didn’t find out WHY he took FOUR FREAKIN’ YEARS to find her. It isn’t the first of Christina’s books to have a cliffhanger ending, which I hate. I just wanted to know why he waited four years. Another 500 words would have made the difference.

Oi.

I wrote a poem about a mermaid because of this book.

I gave it 7/10

Lost Boy

There is one version of my story that everyone knows. And then there is the truth. Once I loved a boy called Peter Pan. Peter brought me to his island because there were no rules and no grownups to make us mind. He brought boys from the Other Place to join in the fun, but Peter’s idea of fun is sharper than a pirate’s sword. He wants always to be that shining sun that we all revolve around. He’ll do anything to be that sun. Peter promised we would all be young and happy forever. Peter will say I’m a villain, that I wronged him, that I never was his friend. Peter Lies.

An interesting version of Peter Pan and his Lost Boys. I’d say it’s not a retelling, just a version of, where we find that his best Lost Boy comes to hate Peter and eventually does grow up. To become Captain Hook.

I gave it  7/10

The Girl in Red

It’s not safe for anyone alone in the woods. But the woman in the red jacket has no choice. Not since the Crisis came, decimated the population, and sent those who survived fleeing into quarantine camps that serve as breeding grounds for death, destruction, and disease. She is just a woman trying not to get killed in a world that was perfectly sane and normal until three months ago.

There are worse threats in the woods than the things that stalk their prey at night. Men with dark desires, weak wills, and evil intents. Men in uniform with classified information, deadly secrets, and unforgiving orders. And sometimes, just sometimes, there’s something worse than all of the horrible people and vicious beasts combined.

Red doesn’t like to think of herself as a killer, but she isn’t about to let herself get eaten up just because she is a woman alone in the woods…

An interesting version of Red Riding Hood. What annoyed the hell out of me was the way her parents and brother dillydallied about the oncoming contagion. People were becoming ill and dying, yet they stayed in their house because it was five mile out of town. Even though Red constantly pushed her parents to pack their bags and get out of town, they still dithered. Until they had no time. After going to town and finding it empty with a burning pile of bodies in the middle of the street, Red’s mother becomes ill with “the cough”. And then the town’s nazis turn up to eliminate the family, as they’re African American. The parents force Red and her brother Adam to run out the back door while their father tries to keep the redneck’s busy by shooting at them, but after days of walking to their grandmother’s house, Adam is killed by the creature that bursts from human’s chests.

Red comes across two children, Sam and Riley, whose parents have died, and takes them with her. They find their way to a small town on the way to grandma’s, but stop for the night in what they think is an abandoned house. Except it’s not. Old Mr Park has boardered up his house, but takes them in for a couple of days, allowing them to use the bath and wash their clothes. He tells them of the patrols, the militia who stalk the town.

After they deal with them, and I’ll let you read that, Red, Sam, and Riley eventually make it to grandma’s cabin in the woods. But while smoke is pouring from the chimney, and the scent of fresh baked bread is in the air, is it really grandma behind the door?

Another of Christina’s books to end in a cliffhanger, it would have been nice for grandma to open the door, just so we’d know if they made it safe and sound.

I gave it 8/10 even with the alien blood, guts and gore and the dickhead idiot parents and brother.

Next fortnight, I talk about Christina’s retelling of Alice in Wonderland.