A promising start for a new author

So, we have Alice and her mother Ella living a fairly transient lifestyle.  They seem to constantly run in to bad luck. Things catch fire, or strange things happen, and Alice even gets kidnapped once.  Ella’s mother, Althea, is an author of a book, Tales from the Hinterland.  It’s a book of dark fairy tales that is no longer published, but has a fanatical cult following.  It’s also a book that Alice has never read, despite her efforts to find a copy. One day they get a letter saying that Althea is dead, so they think they are free.  But Ella gets kidnapped, an Alice sets off with her friend Finch to find her. They try to make their way to The Hazel Wood, Althea’s estate, to try to find Ella.

The strange things that happen to Alice become worse, and it becomes obvious that Tales from the Hinterland may not be purely fictional.  We get to read some of the stories as Finch tells them to Alice, “The Door that Wasn’t There” and most of “Alice-Three-Times”, and they are not happy tales.  Elements of the story start to bleed through into reality. And then things get weird.

Parts of this feels familiar, as it’s supposed to, but in a twisted way.  It feels like a horror movie put in a fairy tale setting. I’m kind of disappointed that we don’t get to read all of the stories, although elements from most, if not all, pop up at one point or another.  I like fairy tales, twisted or otherwise. Some parts seem a bit disjointed, but you can kind of understand why later on in the story. And there’s one section about halfway through the book that you can very clearly see as a movie, the writing is so good.  It would probably be easier to understand as a movie, actually. I wonder if she’s sold the film rights yet? (Yes, yes she has. We’ll see if they do it justice.)