Review – Horseman: A Tale of Sleepy Hollow by Christina Henry
“in Sleepy Hollow strange things were true, and sometimes those strange things reached out their claws”
I received a free copy of this book in return for an honest review. Many thanks to Titan Books and NetGalley for the opportunity.
Here in the North of England, the nights are drawing in early and I am looking for books to put me in the Halloween mood. I am kicking off the season of spooks with Christina Henry’s Horseman. This book is set twenty years after events in Washington Irving’s famous short story and involves some of the same characters. You do not need to have read the original story but you might feel you want to.
The main character is Ben, the fourteen year old grandchild of Brom Bones Van Brunt and Katrina Van Tassel, who feature in the original tale. The book opens with Ben seeing the corpse of a murdered boy, mutilated in a particularly grisly manner. As more children die, Ben becomes aware of a supernatural presence and hears the hoofbeats of the horseman. With the threat drawing closer and closer to home, Ben needs to find the truth of events twenty years earlier surrounding the headless horseman and the disappearance of teacher, Ichabod Crane.
Ben’s transgender nature is one of the strongest themes running through the book. Born female and named Bente, Ben just doesn’t feel like a girl. The book explores, through Ben’s viewpoint what it was like to be a transgender at that time, the acceptance/rejection that came with it. The subject is sensitively handled and is mostly given as a desire on Ben’s part to be a strong grandson to Bones and not be forced into a role that doesn’t fit. It does add an interesting and relatable dimension to the character.
The village of Sleepy Hollow is almost a character in itself. It is a small village where magic can happen, and it seems that what the villagers believe, becomes reality. An insular and superstitious group of people, they tell ghost tales round the fire and constantly feed the supernatural energy of the area, but it is the human evil lurking in the hearts of these people that is the real threat. As the book ends, Sleepy Hollow is opening up to the world and we can see the difference this makes.
There are other themes within the book, secrets and lies within families, the impact of grief, the history of the European migration into America. These all give the book real depth in a way that will help it stand the test of time.
This book does contain violence and gruesome details but the chills come from the growing supernatural threat. The level of menace ratchets up steadily and the pages just fly by. The ending is a perfect blending of old story and new, leaving the reader with a firm sense of closure, that allows for the continuance of Sleepy Hollow as a town where the unusual and supernatural still happens.
Reach for your pumpkins, the Halloween reading season has officially started. Horseman: A Tale of Sleepy Hollow is out now.
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