Midwinterblood Review

TITLE Midwinterblood
AUTHOR Marcus Sedgwick
PUBLICATION April 22nd 2014 by Square Fish
READ June 17 to 18, 2013
SOURCE Purchased

Have you ever had the feeling that you've lived another life? Been somewhere that has felt totally familiar, even though you've never been there before, or felt that you know someone well, even though you are meeting them for the first time? It happens. In 2073 on the remote and secretive island of Blessed, where rumour has it that no one ages and no children are born, a visiting journalist, Eric Seven, and a young local woman known as Merle are ritually slain. Their deaths echo a moment ten centuries before, when, in the dark of the moon, a king was slain, tragically torn from his queen. Their souls search to be reunited, and as mother and son, artist and child, forbidden lovers, victims of a vampire they come close to finding what they've lost. In a novel comprising seven parts, each influenced by a moon - the flower moon, the harvest moon, the hunter's moon, the blood moon - this is the story of Eric and Merle whose souls have been searching for each other since their untimely parting.

I’m not sure how I feel about Midwinterblood being classified as horror. I mean sure, a vampire rears it’s head in the pages, and there is a strong theme of sacrifice that becomes quite gruesome, but through all of this it is a love story. It is an epic love story that transcends time.

I had a tough time easing into this one. The writing is what I have come to expect of a gothic novel in that it feels rather old and formal. However, once I was able to get into the flow of the prose I did get sucked into the story. We are treated to 7 stories that are in revers chronological order. So we start off in 2073 and work our way all the way back to before the 10th century. I’m not sure how I felt about this, I mean I liked it but it seemed to me that things were overlapping in a way that could only happen if time were moving forward. For example, the second story tells a tale of an archaeological dig in 2011 that takes place on Blessed Island in which they find a coffin (cairn) that contains two bodies. Jump one story after that and it is 1944 and we get the story of a fallen airman who finds himself stranded on the island with a broken ankle. He reads in the paper about an archaeological dig on an island that he just knows he has been to before. See, it makes sense if time is moving forward, but how did someone in the past make that connection. Unless he lived the 7 lives in reverse, but that just doesn’t make sense because the 7th life was in 2073. See! I am confused folks, maybe something went over my head here, and I am going to look like an idiot when someone explains it to me but this is how I feel right now.

I did enjoy the epicness of the love story here. I loved how we got the end of their story in the beginning and worked our way back, so I guess you can say I liked the general idea of it though the execution left me scratching my head a bit. Reading all the stories and connecting little strings was fun. Every time a new one would start I was so excited to find out who Eric and Merle were in that life. I also did come to really enjoy the darkness of the writing. In my head it read very ominously and I did feel a little creeped out during the last few stories.

Midwinterblood is beautifully written, incredibly dark novel that will make you long for a love like the one you are reading. I do wish that I didn’t end up being so confused for most of it because I do think that it took away from my immediate enjoyment of the novel but looking back it’s definitely a solid story worth reading.