The Winter People

Over the past several years, I’ve collected a few books by Jennifer McMahon, and there are so many more on my ‘wanted’ list! Now felt like the right time to finally dive into some of her books, and I decided to start with the novel I’ve had the longest: The Winter People. It’s also perfect timing, since winter just began.

Summary

Back in 1908, Sara Harrison Shea died not long after her own daughter’s tragic death. What really happened has become a local legend, passed down for generations in the small Vermont town. Decades later, in 2014, Ruthie is a restless teenager who’s desperate to move to a bigger city and get away from her mom. But when her mom goes missing, leaving Ruthie’s much younger little sister home alone, Ruthie is determined to find out what happened. Then she finds the century-old diary of Sara in her house… could her mother’s disappearance be related to that old legend and whatever lurks in the woods?

Review

The Winter People is the kind of horror story that sucks you in slowly and discreetly. It moves between 1908 and present day (2014), following different sets of characters facing different tragedies that may be more closely connected than they could possibly realize.

In January 1908, Sara Harrison Shea and her husband Martin are the loving parents of their young daughter, Gertie. Gertie’s older brother died as an infant, an event that was devastating for Sara, but which has made Gertie all the more precious to both parents. But then Gertie is killed in an accident, leaving Sara as devastated (and possibly more dangerously so) than before. Martin, too, isn’t sure what’s real and what’s not. Things spiral from there, forever memorialized in Sara’s diary.

Over a century later, Ruthie and her mom and little sister live in the same house that Sara once did. Ruthie and her mom don’t get along well anymore, ever since her dad died a couple years prior, and Ruthie just wants to leave this tiny town and go to college far away. But after a night of partying, Ruthie arrives home to find her six-year-old sister Fawn home alone, their mother inexplicably gone. It’s like she disappeared in the middle of having a cup of tea. Ruthie is determined to find out what happened to their mom, but the more clues she finds, the more confusing it all becomes. What secrets has her mother been hiding? How might it connect with the diary of Sara Harrison Shea?

Meanwhile, as Ruthie is searching for her mom, a woman named Katherine is looking for answers of her own. What was her husband doing in that tiny Vermont town before he died? How might Ruthie’s family be connected to his tragic accident?

The Winter People follows these different characters, both in 1908 and in 2014, showing as everything gets more muddled and confusing… and possibly supernatural. There are hints of monsters in the remote Vermont woods, knowledge that some native peoples in the area have, and unexplained disappearances and deaths spanning into the present day. Is this area haunted by something ghostly or monstrous? Could it be aliens, like Ruthie’s boyfriend thinks? Could it be Sara herself?

This is a somewhat slow-moving but evocative novel, and yet it’s also engaging from start to finish. It feels like the kind of story told at night, among a group of friends or a family huddled away from the cold bite of night.

Final Thoughts

The Winter People isn’t quite what I expected when I first started it, but I did like how it all unfolded. This is a quiet and spooky read that matches the haunting quiet of a snowy landscape, and it was perfect for the current season. I have several other books from Jennifer McMahon that I plan to read soon, so look out for my reviews of those!

Get the Book

You can buy The Winter People here – it’s available as a paperback, ebook, and audiobook.

The Winter People by Jennifer McMahon
Audience	Adult
Genre	Horror
Setting	Vermont
Number of Pages	382
Format I Read	Paperback
Original Publication Date	January 6, 2015
Publisher	Vintage

Official Summary

The New York Times bestselling author of Promise Not to Tell returns with a simmering literary thriller about ghostly secrets, dark choices, and the unbreakable bond between mothers and daughters . . . sometimes too unbreakable.

West Hall, Vermont, has always been a town of strange disappearances and old legends. The most mysterious is that of Sara Harrison Shea, who, in 1908, was found dead in the field behind her house just months after the tragic death of her daughter, Gertie. Now, in present day, nineteen-year-old Ruthie lives in Sara’s farmhouse with her mother, Alice, and her younger sister, Fawn. Alice has always insisted that they live off the grid, a decision that suddenly proves perilous when Ruthie wakes up one morning to find that Alice has vanished without a trace. Searching for clues, she is startled to find a copy of Sara Harrison Shea’s diary hidden beneath the floorboards of her mother’s bedroom. As Ruthie gets sucked deeper into the mystery of Sara’s fate, she discovers that she’s not the only person who’s desperately looking for someone that they’ve lost. But she may be the only one who can stop history from repeating itself.

About the Author

Credit: Zella McMahon

I’m the New York Times Bestselling author of eleven suspense novels including The Winter People and Promise Not To Tell. My latest, The Children on the Hill, will be out in April. I’ve written about ghosts, serial killers, shape shifting monsters, an evil fairy king, a kidnapping rabbit, and now, a terrifying swimming pool.

My first novel was, at its heart, a ghost story. That novel drew me to write about the unexplained, the dark side, the fears that keep me awake at night, the way the past haunts the present. When studying writing in college and grad school, again and again I was told: Write what you know. But over the years, I have developed my own mantra, one which is so vital to who I am and what I do that I had it tattooed on my wrist: Write what scares you.

I live in Vermont (in a creepy old Victorian on a hill) with my partner, Drea, and our daughter, Zella. When I’m not writing, I spend a lot of time exploring the dark Vermont woods and seeking out haunted places, real and imagined.