Review: A Gathering of Ghosts

4 stars. Maitland is an incredible author - y'all are begging and screaming for anything that smells even REMOTELY like Between Two Fires and she's RIGHT HERE! This is the deeply researched, immersive, medieval horror you're looking for! And she has a ton of books to choose from - this was a little more up my alley than Company of Liars, but both = very memorable, enjoyable reading experiences. 

England, mid-1300s. The Priory of St Mary is visited by a series of unexpected visitors: a Knight of St John, dispatched to review the Priory's financial activities and accounts related to the church; a young girl, alone and impoverished who lands in a nearby camp of tinners but feels called to something more; and a child, blind, whose arrival coincides with a violent death. In a rough landscape made rougher by the tinners, the Priory's inhabitants are caught between honoring the church and protecting their own survival. 

I particularly loved the lack of traditional heroes/villains in this story. You really are plopped down in the middle of a situation where characters orbit each other and interact in interesting - but not necessarily archetypal - ways. I also really loved the interplay of old and new religions - it's a Big and Common Theme, and in this case, one religion is literally stacked on top of another. The author dramatically paints the conflict around traditional beliefs evolving and blurring into something new, and the intersection of all that with economics and politics and power, and gender, of course...

Okay, so one quibble: multiple times I found myself wanting this book to get to the point. It's not that it dragged, exactly, but there was a lot of ... circling the drain, so to speak, and we spent a lot of time inner monologuing in repetitive ways. Character motivations were well-established 75% of the way through, we didn't need to keep wallowing in their wallowing. I would also mention that the author asks a lot of you - there's a handy glossary, and a historical guide, but there are terms and concepts and references here that will be unfamiliar to anyone but a medieval expert. I didn't mind - for me it didn't detract from the story. In fact, that helped make it compelling. 

This is a medieval fairy tale without a single drop of romanticism: it's gritty, muddy, dank, gross, dark, wet, dreary, mossy, smoky, smelly, dirty, cruel, bloody, and terrifying. Wrong and right are twisted and twisted again into a fascinating knot. There are multiple types of horror: atmospheric, religious, supernatural, demonic, animal horror, body horror, human horror... I highly, highly recommend. 

A Gathering of Ghosts on: Amazon | Bookshop.org | Goodreads | StoryGraph