by Patrick McCabe
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Product Description
“A fever dream of a novel…At heart, Winterwood is a Gothic ghost story…like Stephen King, McCabe knows how to invest pop culture with a sinister bathos. McCabe is also more intense than King (or just about anyone else).”—New York Times Book Review The San Francisco Chronicle declared him “one of the most brilliant writers to ever come out of Ireland,” and Neil Jordan called Winterwood “the most terrifying book I’ve ever read.” In this chilling and unforgettable novel, Patrick McCabe shows us that nothing—and no one—is ever quite what they seem. Shortlisted for the Irish Book Award for Novel of the Year, Winterwood is a disturbing tale of love, death, and identity from a masterful novelist whose “books are skillful exercises in the macabre and the horrific. It is as though Stephen King had learned how to write” ( New York Review of Books).
Average Customer Review:
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
 Should be marketed as a thriller., 2008-11-24
Can anyone say "determinism"? The underlying premise of this novel, which has not really been mentioned in most reviews, is that a traumatic childhood experience will inevitably lead to the victim's reenactment of that trauma at an older age, i.e. every victim becomes a criminal. There is a really creepy suggestion that each subsequent generation is, deep down, an exact copy of the previous one. This damaging and disgusting idea purveyed by the novel is just as creepy as the novel's creepy and very contrived thematic of middle-class-father-turned-murderer. At heart, this novel is every bit as problematic as Kevin Kostner's film "Mr. Brooks," another work that seems to suggest that our future, evil actions are genetically coded into us at birth.
Which brings me to my conclusion: this is a trashy thriller that you should probably read while in transit.
1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Wanted To Like It, 2008-05-29
I really wanted to like this book better than I did. The premise sounded interesting; the local newspaper mini-review stated that it was the story of a writer who becomes enchanted by an old fiddler he meets in the woods. I immediately ordered the book and could hardly wait to pick it up and read it. Perhaps it's not quite fair to say the writing is bad; it's just not my style and was hard to follow. I appreciated the supernatural aspect of the story and there were moments of real creepiness but it did not "scare me to death", as one fellow writer stated on the back cover. It was too jumbled and jumpy for me to feel the full effect of terror. I must admit the story stayed with me for days after I read it. But I think that if the author had used a different writing style I would have appreciated it more, although I realize each writer has his/her own style. It was not a terrible book - just not quite my cup of tea.
0 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
 A Poorly Written Novel, 2008-04-30
I felt that this book was very poorly written. There were too many questions left unanswered. The book reviews on the cover mislead me into expecting an exciting and eerie book, but I did not find this book at all compelling. I had to force myself to finish it. It started out good, but I felt like I was always waiting for something to happen. The ending seemed rushed and incomplete.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
 Definitely creepy., 2008-04-22
I found myself thinking back and comparing this book to Catcher in the Rye. An unsettling study of a person spiraling out of control as told by the person experiencing the decline. It was a little difficult to follow at times as the story jumps around. I think Patrick McCabe did this to further illustrate how disjointed Redmond Hatch's mind had become.
Overall I liked it but I agree with one other reviewer. The ending seemed rushed and abrupt leaving certain things unexplained. I guess I expected a little more but was still a good read.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Into the valley of shadow, once again, 2007-12-20
This is the fifth novel I've read of his; you can find my reviews of "The Dead School," "The Butcher Boy," "Breakfast on Pluto," and "Call Me the Breeze" on Amazon US. By now, long into a career that has earned McCabe acclaim, his protagonist Redmond Hatch fits a familiar pattern of a steady decline from middle-class suburban happiness, marital bliss, and contemporary creature comforts. By now, it becomes apparent that "Winterwood" repeats the narrative arc, and defamiliarizing storytelling twists, that chart the decay of a mind, an erosion of ethics, and a collapse into violence. All these characterize McCabe's fiction: he excels at bringing you within a couple of hundred pages from stability into chaos, often channelled from a disorientingly casual, knowing, and comforting voice that takes you into its confidence only to relate escalating tales of mayhem and murder.
The reviews posted on Amazon US practically gave away the entire plot. Perhaps, given the trajectory of McCabe's sorrowful taletellers, this may not spoil any surprises. By the eighties, a third of the way through the book's pages, I saw the end coming, and the rest of the book, as they say, was all downhill. So, what kept me reading this grim account? McCabe's best quality remains his diabolically intimate, insinuatingly composed conversational style. It's as if the Archfiend took you into his parlor for a fireside chat.
However, few elements stand out for their individually rendered scene-setting, or their particular turns of phrase. The effect of such novels by McCabe accumulates gradually. They can be confusing; more than once I had to check chronology or casual asides that, in giving or withholding key details, otherwise would have left a casual reader bewildered. Although I wished for more about the promising clash of mountainy men and Slievenageeha Lidl (the name sums up not only the superstore but the juxtaposition that increasingly mars modern Ireland), the societal changes, well-evoked in a couple of quick paragraphs about the unceasing traffic of today's Rathfarnham and the shopping mall-with-casino that towers over the once-moribund valley of the author's childhood sum it up, I suppose, enough for McCabe. I have always been attracted by his male misfits, who find recourse to assault as their tender spouses turn adulterers and their parents and relatives (a bit too predictably by now, as in so much of Irish fiction alas based on fact the past few decades) turn molesters. McCabe understands the disintegration of the hapless figure who cannot withstand the impact of early deceit, and how childhood's shadows stretch across the twentieth century into our own frenetic age.
So, this novel, while strong in the manner of earlier novels, does follow this same path. It is McCabe's direction for his imagination to run wild within the tracks of insanity that he loves his characters to follow. He does, by now in his fifties, show his command of such themes. Yet, I do wish he could step aside from the twisted creatures he creates so delicately. You flinch when reading his stories. He doubtless would have it no other way, but after the fifth such encounter with these dark voices, I hesitate to return to another Irish gothic cry from the depths of evil.
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