Buried Thunder

We’ve been here before. A family arrives in a village to take over a hotel, which, it turns out, has something nasty in its past. The daughter, Maya, has an encounter with a trio of corpses in the forest. They subsequently disappear, but a local police officer is a live ringer for one of the bodies. Has Maya had a warning of atrocities to come? Like many such villages on the literary and cinematic map, there are ritualistic goings on: foxes being beheaded and disembowelled; headless figures carved out of trees; a young tattooed vagrant lurking in the undergrowth; an almost speechless gentle giant who knows more than he can tell; a figure dressed in fox pelts; and a fox whose yellow eyes haunt Maya even in the safety of her own room. Still, if the basic scenario is familiar, Bowler rings enough changes and manipulates menace, mystery and gruesome detail to such effect that you can forgive him the 40 pages it takes to explain nearly everything; a solution that no-one could have guessed at; and the few loose ends that are still left dangling.