Little Eve
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3.8 • 12 Ratings
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- £4.99
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- £4.99
Publisher Description
'Where is Evelyn? Oh, I remember. She took our eyes.'
Winner of the British Fantasy Award for Best Horror and the Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novel.
New Year's Day, 1921. Seven mutilated bodies are discovered in an ancient stone circle on a remote Scottish island. The victims are 'the Children' - members of a nature cult ruled by the charismatic, sadistic patriarch, the adder.
The sole survivor of the massacre, Dinah, claims that Eve is the murderer, apparently drowned while attempting her escape. Yet as Eve's story of the years leading up the massacre intertwines with Dinah's account of the aftermath, a darker, stranger truth begins to emerge.
The Isle is all Eve knows. Hidden from the world, the Children worship the Great Snake who dwells in the ocean, dance in the stones at dawn and offer their blood in sacrifice. The adder's word is law. When Eve is forced into the world beyond the Isle her faith and love are tested by unexpected friendships that make her question everything. As she begins to see through the adder's macabre fictions, the world Eve knows collapses. Does she lose her humanity with her belief? Does it drive her to kill?
A heart-pounding literary thriller with a devastating twist.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This powerful novel from Ward (The Last House on Needless Street), originally published in the U.K. in 2018, won the August Derleth and Shirley Jackson awards. Justifiably so, as Ward's skillful weaving of horror and mystery forms a dense, rich tapestry. In 1921, Little Eve commits a mass murder so heinous that, a quarter-century later, the villagers of Loyal still whisper about her attack on those with whom she shared the island of Altnaharra: cult leader Uncle, who ruled with honeyed fingers and the bite of a captive snake; Nora, perpetually pregnant; Dinah, tempted by the wider world; and Baby Elizabeth, a mute and filthy 11-year-old. Multiple narrative voices fill in the details of what happened, which initially appears to be a familiar, albeit exceptionally well-told, description of an incestuous cult devolving to its horrific end. Then Chief Insp. Christopher Black, in an improbable white suit, meets Eve on a woodland path, and the expected trajectory shifts deliciously. Ward works in so many motifs—Bible resonances, colonialism, science versus faith, and the pall of war, to name just a few—that the play of imagery is as engrossing as the plot twists, making this a rewarding outing from any angle. Horror fans won't want to miss this.
