Withered Hill is an unsettling horror novel inspired by British folklore with themes like death, love, lust, and grief. In it, we meet two characters with the same identity but worlds apart from each other. One of them is referred to as “Outside Sophie” whilst the other is referred to as “Inside Sophie.” The story takes place in a dual timeline, but both worlds soon collide in an epic but eerie way.
Outside Sophie lives in London with her friends—who all seem to be leaving her, getting married, getting pregnant, or embarking on new jobs while her own life stays stagnant. Sophie Wickham is thirty-two years old and going through a mid-life crisis. In the opening scene, Sophie is at Donna’s going-away party, celebrating her friend’s new job. It is in this first scene that we see just how territorial, selfish, and self-centered Sophie is:
“I don’t want you to go to Dubai.”
“You’re supposed to be happy for Donna!” says Liz.
“I am happy for her,” says Sophie, which everyone knew was a lie.
One of her married friends suggests Sophie take up a new job she loves, one that would utilise her skills rather than waste them at a temp job. She suggests that this would make Sophie happier. But Sophie gets up abruptly, knocking over glasses, and remarks, “What would make me happier is if everyone would just stop leaving.” This little outburst of emotion echoes the voice of the inner child within Sophie, who wants to hold onto the last shreds of attention she has. The statement highlights how lonely and left out she is feeling from her “gang.” She had made a family out of them after losing her parents in a tragic accident just as she was expelled from college. And now they are gone.
In a flashback, Sophie is expelled from her college because she frames Niamh Glenister, her “frenemy,” for stealing petty things from the girls’ dorm. This is in retaliation for Niamh drugging Sophie and seducing Neil, her potential love interest and the guy to whom she wants to lose her virginity. Sophie was always an awkward kid but in college she has sought to reinvent herself. All this was ruined when Niamh arrived. Being born with a silver spoon in her mouth, Niamh is the “real life of the party,” and exposes Sophie for the “country bumpkin” that she is, stealing the spotlight that Sophie craves. Niamh, a promising law student whose future career is jeopardised by the accusations, vehemently denies Sophie’s accusations of theft and attempts suicide. Only at this point does Sophie confess. Again, we see just how territorial Sophie can be and to what extent she is willing to go to keep what is hers.
In another flashback, to when Sophie was nine years old, she is left alone with her baby sister and grandmother when her parents go out to dinner. Given this opportunity, Sophie takes the life of her baby sister, Emily, by suffocating her. Sophie feels as though Emily’s entry into the family would replace and rob her of her parents’ love and affection. These feelings will later haunt Sophie throughout her life as she seeks love and attention from the wrong people, such as men like Jamie, who end up abusing her. In a nutshell, Sophie is a child stuck in a thirty-two-year-old’s body seeking love in toxic ways. She is coming from a place of unresolved trauma.
When she moves to London it is a second attempt at reinventing herself, running away from memories and her own identity until both come knocking at her door again in what seem to be hallucinations. These are complemented by creepy packages sent to her workplace and strange messages on her Facebook (“They have found you”). She thinks she sees Emily in a bookstore and follows her out to a dark alley—only to be brought back to reality by a phone call from her boss.
At this point, the novel seems to go backwards in time: A naked woman, “picking twigs from her eyes and brushing soil from her breasts,” stumbles into the mysterious village of Withered Hill shorn of memory. “She was not there,” we read, “and then she was.” The first place she comes to is Nut Nan Farm; the residents there put on pig-faced masks and point her further along the road, where she encounters more people with animal masks until she gets to a pub with a thatched roof and a sign creaking in the breeze. In flaking paint, it depicts a man in a smock, with a scythe and a sheaf of wheat. On the wall of the pub are the words “The Farmer and the Devil.”
This is Inside Sophie, and she is one of Owd Hob’s wives, grown from the manure of his last wife and from a “hank of hair” of the original Sophie. She thinks she is a prisoner and tries to escape many times through the woods, by road, and by way of joining Peter O’Keefe’s flock on its way to graze in the next town over. But Withered Hill is some kind of mini hell on earth to those who end up there and to those who try to leave it.
In English folklore, Owd Hob has many names and takes on many forms. He has has made many appearances on the literary scene, in books like Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (1999), The Spiderwick Chronicles by Tony DiTerlizzi (2003-4), the work of Holly Black, and in The Chronicles of Narnia by C. S. Lewis (1950-6). In all these books, too, Owd Hob takes many forms. In Withered Hill, Owd Hob has offered the village annual great harvests provided he receives from them a wife. You can call Owd Hob neither a devil nor a god; he is somewhere in between, meting out a form of justice, a drama within a drama, and employing the village’s residents as mere minions in an agenda to “rewild” the world. He claims that there were once many like him, a legion that was destroyed due to industrialisation. His revenge, he says, is to replace bad energy in the world with good: that is, to kill Outside Sophie and replace her with Inside Sophie.
One wonders why women are at the forefront of Owd Hob’s scheme, with males like Jamie often simply killed off as a sacrifice, not being offered the chance to become something else. Perhaps women represent fertility, fecundity, and are nurturers and custodians of tradition. Perhaps Withered Hill brings to life the fear of old and small towns with secrets to hide and moralities to police, taking our nightmares far beyond the confines of our bedroom closets and under our beds. Or perhaps Owd Hob and this novel are a scared child’s nightmare: This novel is hardly about him at all, is perhaps not even about his plan for delivering justice to humanity. He may merely be an instrument of change to make a selfish woman realise the error of her ways.