
Little Eve by Catriona Ward
Little Eve is the best gothic horror book I read last year. Originally published in the United Kingdom in 2018, it won the Shirley Jackson award and the British Fantasy Award for Best Horror Novel. It’s a book saturated with atmosphere, filled with clues, puzzles, masks and secret identities. Ultimately, it’s about cults, serpents, sisters, lies, and love.
The book starts in the 1920s, when a local man in a remote Scottish village discovers the bodies of everyone who lives in the rotting castle on the bluff. All are dead except one. Dinah, a young woman his age, has survived. Her story is strange, but the group—the “family”—who lived at the castle were strange to begin with. The mystery remains as the story shifts; to an earlier death in 1917, and forward to the aftermath of the mass death at the castle.
The story is told among shifting points of view... Read More