The Taken Sarah Pinborough Fiction; Horror I am forever on a quest to find good horror authors, and as a rule I almost always prefer the Brits. I’m also forever on a quest to find good female horror authors, and Sarah Pinborough has stepped into that sparsely-populated spot rather well. I discovered her through Dorchester/Leisure’s large line of mass market horror paperbacks. Not only do I love the way Brits tend to write, but I also love English, Irish, Welsh and Scottish settings. In this story, Alex(andra) is a young woman who, after the demise of her marriage, has come to stay for awhile with an aunt in the rural English village of Watterow . One of the most startling and effective devices in this story is the fact, known only to Alex and to the reader, that Alex is dying of ovarian cancer, and dying quickly. She only has a few months left, and the cancer is the real reason her marriage ended, although no one knows this because Alex has decided to keep the cancer a secret from everyone for as long as possible, until she literally cannot hide it anymore. For the reader, knowing this and being inside Alex’s head as she struggles with her pain, despair and internal rage, brings an intimacy and dark edge to the story that really changes one’s perception of everything that takes place. Not really ready to deal with anything beyond the very immediate present, Alex runs straight into an old secret the town has covered up for decades. All Alex knows at first is that a supposedly long-dead, angelic-looking 10-year old girl named Melanie Parr has something to do with a sudden rash of shockingly violent deaths in the once-peaceful little town, and that whenever the girl’s name is mentioned the locals – including Alex’s own cousin – glance at each other, clam up, and radiate fear from every fiber. Who on earth was this girl, Alex wonders, and what kind of sinister hold does a little girl lost in a storm 30 years ago have on these people? Who, too, is “The Catcher Man” people whisper about – often in the same breath? Once a pagan forest legend about a fertility god, twisted into a sinister being who steals children, it poses an interesting if indirect question about what kind of genuine power the human ‘thought form’ can give to something and truly make it real. I was thoroughly captivated by this book and have already ordered Pinborough’s other novels. She’s definitely one author horror fans should be watching for if they haven’t discovered her already.
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Title: The Historian
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