Diving into the Books of Horror Go To List, I expected to encounter different subgenres of horror, from quiet to extreme, and I've certainly done that. What I didn't expect to find was so much that I'd call horror adjacent. To cite three examples, 'Tampa', 'FantasticLand' and 'This Thing Between Us' aren't horror novels per se, but they are novels full of horror and so they read well to a horror audience. In keeping with that, 'Winterset Hollow' is a lot of things, general fiction being one, but it's a fantasy novel above all, with a cast that prominently includes a talking rabbit, frog, fox and bear. It's akin to the middle ground between 'The Wind in the Willows' and 'The Most Dangerous Game' and, as that might suggest, it does indeed turn into survival horror.

'Winterset Hollow' by Jonathan Edward Durham is a book about a book called 'Winterset Hollow', a timeless classic of children's fantasy by E. B. Addington, which was written in careful verse sixty or so years ago. It's changed people's lives; like young John Eamon Buckley, one of our leads, who goes by his middle name and is on a literary pilgrimage to the town of West Rock, Washington, as that's where Addington lived and wrote his famous book. He's a strange young man, who grew up with his father on a private compound in Idaho learning how to survive, something he then had to do when his father left mysteriously and never came back.

He's here with a friend, Caroline, who also loves 'Winterset Hollow', and her boyfriend, Mark, who isn't a reader but is gamely tagging along anyway. Eamon and Caroline read a 'Winterset Hollow' fanzine called 'The Frog's Feast' and, through that zine, received tickets to visit Addington Isle on Barley Day, a pivotal holiday in this fictional book. I love this setup, which reminded me of various literary pilgrimages I've made myself, like one to Sauk City, Wisconsin, the home of Arkham House publishers, especially given that, like Sauk City, West Rock doesn't seem to have any intention to flaunt its literary history. They've apparently forgotten who E. B. Addington was.

It's quickly obvious that this trip isn't going to be what these Hollowheads think when they arrive at the pier to catch the ferry over to Addington Isle to discover not only seven other fans there, in wait too, but no ferry service. It's been out of service for five or six years, a trawler captain picking them up instead and dropping them off on the island without any sort of ceremony and nobody to greet them on arrival. However, once they wander into the island proper to find an immaculately kept mansion, Addington's family home, they're met by the characters that he wrote about in his children's fantasy, the famous Runnymeade Rabbit himself welcoming them on Barley Day.

Apparently, like Richard Upton Pickman, Addington created his work using life models. Just four of them remain, a small remnant of a formerly thriving ancient community of human sized animals, and Addington wrote about all of them in 'Winterset Hollow': not merely Runnymeade Rabbit, but Flackwell Frog, Phineas Fox and Binghamton Bear. They're all getting old, as you might imagine as characters from a sixty-year-old book, but they're polite and erudite and more than happy to treat our Hollowheads to an impeccable Barley Day feast cooked, I must add, by Flackwell Frog himself, an exceedingly talented chef.

There's plenty more here to discover and plenty of depth to explore, because the author takes his time building his novel to the point of that reveal, which comes at the end of part one, fewer than forty pages into the book. Then he builds it further and then he turns it completely on its head for no apparent reason, gradually answering our questions as the consequences play out. It's the sort of book that ends up being classified as general fiction (or classic) because lumping it into any one genre feels problematic, like, say, 'Lord of the Flies' or 'The Road', even 'Frankenstein'.

It works wonderfully as children's fantasy, the four anthropormophic characters highly varied and always engaging. Runny is a true gentleman, polite and erudite. Flackwell is an enthusiastic chef, eager to please anyone at his table. They seem to be best friends and, as different as they are, gel well enough that we can believe that they've spent sixty years in each other's close company. Finn, on the other hand, is a pissed-off fox, always ready to figuratively snap at someone, and Bing is an old and tired bear, apparently content to just sit back and watch the animated feature version of 'Winterset Hollow' yet again rather than engage with company.

It works wonderfully as horror, not only because the tables are turned during the Barley Day feast but especially because of the history that Jonathan Edward Durham gradually reveals as the pack of Hollowheads is whittled down. Perhaps the most brutal horror isn't the violence, though there is plenty of that to come, but the revelation that our ancestors were evil, something that's timely in an America that's coming to terms not only with Native American genocide, but horrors visited by the church on those who weren't killed. I mention Native Americans here, because that seems to be the closest comparison, but slavery is applicable too. Durham bubbles a lot to the surface in this book.

And it works wonderfully as whimsical rhyme too. The novel itself is told in prose, as we expect, but each part also features a substantial excerpt from E. B. Addington's 'Winterset Hollow', enough to give us a serious glimpse into what captured these Hollowheads and led them to Addington Isle. It flows well as poetry, reminding less of 'The Magic Pudding' and more of 'The Hunting of the Snark' in that it's clearly meant to be read aloud rather than sung. Even at its most brutal, it never loses its sense of decorum or indeed its sense of light. There are claustrophobic scenes set in the dark in this book, but the ambience is mostly sunshine, all the better to see all the death. The white cover, an anomaly in horror fiction, feels all the more appropriate.

There are other excerpts dotted here and there too, so we're treated to quite a literary backdrop and that could easily have gone horribly wrong. Writing poetry and prose requires two different skills, though I do tend to believe that the best poets also make the best writers of prose because flow and word selection are crucial well-used tools in their toolkits. Durham, who writes powerful prose, could easily write an epic children's fantasy in verse should he ever feel the urge. I wonder if he did. Maybe he'll actually publish 'Winterset Hollow' by E. B. Addington as a separate volume.

It's sheer coincidence that I'm reviewing this as a Books of Horror Go To List selection at the same time I'm reviewing classic children's genre novels, but it honestly feels like it could move from one category to the other. All it takes is time and I don't see 'Winterset Hollow' fading in any reader's memory. ~~ Hal C F Astell