The Hidden People

September 12, 2016
There’s an amazing sense of place and time in this novel, as Littlewood (Zombie Apocalypse! Acapulcalypse Now!) perfectly captures the literary style, attitudes, and class consciousness of Victorian England. Albie Mirrals has a passing fancy for his young, poorly situated cousin Lizzie, but he ends up in a happy marriage with a fellow member of the upper classes. When Lizzie is murdered by her husband in a small town with deep-rooted superstitions about fairies, Albie investigates and ends up calling his entire life into question in a mystery that’s pleasant but predictable. Littlewood carefully refrains from revealing whether the fairies are real or mere myth. Albie’s actions doom him at the right moments; indeed, there’s no suspense at all to his character arc, which is straight out of Poe, right down to the uncomfortable romance. The female characters, particularly Albie’s wife, get short shrift in the story, and the plot is predictable for anyone familiar with works of the era. This is an accurate pastiche of Victorian fiction, with all the attendant positives and negatives.

When a young woman is brutally murdered, her urbane cousin plans to debunk superstition and find out what really happened. But Yorkshire in the 1800s is a rather mysterious, suggestive place, and soon it's unclear where the line falls between the supernatural and human cruelty.Recently married and planning to take over his father's business interests in London, Albie is haunted by word of his cousin Lizzie's death. And the circumstances--burned by her husband, who thought she was a fairy who had taken his wife's place--drive him to the village of Halfoak, where the villagers avoid going outside on the night of the full moon for fear they will be bewitched or stolen away. At first, Albie is angry and dismissive of the local superstitions, but when his wife joins him and begins acting strangely, he must reconsider all of his prejudices against the village's pagan inheritance. A dead baby, an elfin child, a seductive squire's son, and a tight-lipped parson draw him further into the mystery, and when he finds Lizzie's journal, the truth becomes apparent. Littlewood (A Cold Silence, 2015, etc.) expertly creates an atmosphere of unease, interestingly tied to Albie's reading of Wuthering Heights, but Albie's lack of empathy for those around him, and his failure to care for or investigate his own wife's suffering, instead always casting himself as the victim of her changing character, make him an off-putting character. In the end, it seems to be more a novel of men versus women rather than old ways versus new ways, and female readers should feel uncomfortable about this dichotomy. Suitably strange with a twist, but the misogyny of the main character, true to the time period, is off-putting for a modern audience. COPYRIGHT(1) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

November 1, 2016
Albie never forgot the day he met his cousin Lizzie for the first, and only, time. It was 1851, and Lizzie and her father had traveled from their remote village in the English countryside to industrial London for the Great Exhibition.Though thoroughly captivated by his cousin, Albie does not often think of Lizzie as he enters adult life, joins his father's business, and marries. He is taken completely off guard the morning his father tells him that Lizzie has been brutally murdered by her own husband. His defense: Lizzie had been taken by fairies, and it was a fairy changeling, not Lizzie, whom he had burned alive. Horrified and deeply disturbed by this news, Albie takes it upon himself to travel to her village to see justice done. An outsider there, Albie undertakes a dark and twisted path, resulting in many more questions with seemingly only supernatural answers. The perfect book to curl up with on a chilly fall day, The Hidden People will make the hairs on the back of your neck stand up.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)