Immortelle

An incessant drizzle falls as we make our way down the lane and onto the track which leads to the church. My skin is baptized by its gentle cooling. No one speaks, not even the birds. Instead they bow their heads in sympathy. Leaden legs fall foward, one step at a time, like an automaton. My innards are a pit of waste and I expect to wake up at any moment.

Oh, there is some delicious prose going on in this book.

Is "cozy horror" a thing? That feels weird to say about a story centered around a mother grieving the loss of her child, but if you read it you might agree with me. This is a very introverted book with a lot of introspection and not a lot of dialogue (and what dialogue there is feels unusually formal to me, especially from the children, but maybe that's just a reflection of the time period). But then again I don't exactly begrudge people who'd rather spend their time indoors in a setting like this. The winter months of Victorian-era coastal Wales comes off as extremely dreary, which I mean as a compliment here.

At heart this absolutely is Now That's What I Call Grief! Vol. 24, but it is also a ghost story. Supernatural elements are enjoyably "wait, what was that?" at first, but there comes a point where it transitions from the subtle to the explicit that sort of lost me. I understand why the story demanded it, I just wasn't much of a fan of it. If nothing else, I learned a lot about pottery and clayworking, and I do enjoy when a book is hyper-detailed about a trade I'm unfamiliar with.

It's a short ghost story best suited for the bleakest winter months when you haven't seen the sun come out for a few days.