We don’t want to sound curmudgeonly, but going out of your way to help people is never a great idea. Good deeds almost always blow up in your face so keeping yourself to yourself is always the best thing to do. Don’t tell anyone we told you that, though. Tell them Martyn Waites’ latest novel The Old Religion did.
Brexit is destroying the beautiful Cornish village of St Petroc, but the embattled locals aren’t going down without a fight. Tom Kilgannon, a recent arrival to the village, doesn’t realise quite how far they’re willing to go until he befriends a young runaway called Lila who knows something about the fate of a missing student and seems to be in fear for her life. Tom knows he shouldn’t go here – he’s already in the Witness Protection Programme and has good reason to suspect that some very nasty people are still after him – but he already breaks the rules, like having an affair with his married police officer/handler. And what harm is there in giving this frightened kid refuge? Probably none… until she disappears, taking all his valuable identity documents with her.
Now Tom needs to find Lila before his identity falls into the wrong hands, which puts him on a terrifying collision course with the enigmatic Morrigan Crow and the resurgence of a ruthless branch of the pagan ‘old religion’. Morrigan wants Lila just as badly as Tom does, and the time for sacrifice is approaching. Who is going to find her first?
Yes, we are definitely in Wicker Man territory here but leave your ‘I’ve already seen this/read that’ cynicism at the door because Martyn Waites’ excellent new thriller still managed to keep us on edge even while it was scattering all the folk horror tropes around like nine-pins. If you’re a frustrated crime/horror author scrabbling for the next great idea, you’re going to love this and hate this in equal measure – love it because it’s brilliantly written with a plot that flows like daemonic clockwork; hate it because it’s such a brilliant twist to an old idea you’ll be jealous you didn’t think of it first. Tom Kilgannon is a terrific protagonist with enough backstory for a whole coven of twisted follow-ups (assuming he survives this initial adventure, of course) and the way Waites combines the anger and unrest of Brexit Britain with the dark ritualism of ancient pagan belief is pretty much genius. Yes, we know it’s been tried before but it’s rarely, if ever, been done this well. If the Hammer film crew are still scouting around for projects, they really need to option The Old Religion pretty smart-ish.
You don’t need a stone circle or a scrying mirror to predict what we’re going to say next.
Just read it.
THE OLD RELIGION / AUTHOR: MARTYN WAITES / PUBLISHER: ZAFFRE / RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW
