Book Review: 'Candlenight' by Phil Rickman
'Candlenight' (463 pp.) first was published in hardcover in 1991; this mass market paperback edition was released by Jove in September 1995. The cover artist is uncredited.
Phil Rickman is a UK author who regularly has been publishing mystery novels featuring the lead character 'Merrily Watkins'. As of 2022, there are 15 novels in the Merrily Watkins franchise. Along with 'Candlenight', Rickman also has authored five other horror novels, all set in rural areas of the UK.
'Candlenight' takes place in the UK of the early 1990s. The lead characters, Giles and Claire Freeman, are young professionals increasingly unhappy with the fast pace of life in London. When Claire gets word that her estranged grandfather, Judge Thomas Rhys, has died and bequeathed to her his cottage in rural Wales in the village of Y Groes (pronounced 'Uh Groyce'), Giles is rapt at the thought of taking up a rustic lifestyle.
However, Claire's mother Elinor, who had little love for her father the Judge, is alarmed at the thought of her daughter moving into the cottage. And Giles's journalist friends warn him that the Welsh do not like the English, especially ones who appropriate housing better left in the hands of the long-suffering Welsh. But Giles is determined to embrace Wales and its culture, and anxious to contradict the image of the English as rude and insensitive interlopers.
When Giles's friend, American journalist Berry Morelli, accompanies Giles on an inaugural visit to Y Groes, they both find the village to be the epitome of country life, and in some ways, almost too good to be true. But for Berry, Judge Rhys's cottage and its gloomy, austere furnishings evoke a sense of deep unease, even dread. However, his admonitions to Giles go unheeded, and in due course the Freemans move into the cottage.
Having not read Thomas Tryon's 1973 novel Harvest Home, the Freemans are of course oblivious to the sinister reality that underlies the bucolic charm of Y Groes and its friendly, but eccentric, inhabitants. A reality based on adherence to the Olde Ways, and the Olde Gods. Gods who must be propitiated............and if there are some witless Englishmen within easy reach come propitiating time, so much the better.........
'Candlenight' essentially is a melodrama, set in Wales, with negligible horror content. While author Rickman writes with a clean, unadorned prose style, the novel has the lumbering, dilatory quality of too many 'Paperbacks from Hell' wherein the machinations of the plot take up so much of the text, that the scares inevitably are watery and unconvincing.
Perhaps because I'm an American, 'Candlenight''s underlying theme of the antipathy between the Welsh and the English failed to resonate. I also quickly tired of trying to figure out how to pronounce words like 'Aberystwyth', and simply began treating them as if they were Mandarin.
The worst part of 'Candlenight' is the denouement, which takes so long to unfold, and involves so many contrivances, that I nearly abandoned the book in dissatisfaction.
The verdict ? Even the most avid fans of Paperbacks from Hell are going to want to pass on 'Candlenight'. Had the book been 150 pages shorter and the horror content greatly reinforced it might have been memorable, but as it is, it deserves a one-star score.
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