The Brink

by Sophia Adamowicz

Set in the 17th century English countryside, The Brink blends historical and eldritch folk horror in a queer tale of awakening while exploring a darkly hungry Derbyshire Peak District— where the perils may be natural, unnatural, or very human. When the keeper of a demonic hell hole falls in love with the perfect sacrifice, she must her loyalty to both her family and her village, or salvaging her own chance at happiness. It is 1642 in Derbyshire, England. Jane Vernon spends her days trying to satiate the hungry spirit that dwells within Elden Hole, a generational curse shared with her siblings. But each sacrifice increases her reluctance, until the offering of one travelling merchant starts unravelling the fabric of murderous duty and exploitation that shapes her life. Isaac Latimer appears as a wealthy wanderer searching the countryside for his cousin, Sarah, last spotted in the company of an older man. As a guilty conscience drives Jane to join Isaac in his hunt, she catches a glimpse of an unburdened life even while realising nothing is as it seems. Among sacrifices and betrayals, burgeoning love and decaying lies, the spirit' s hunger grows alongside threats in the dark, and only a Vernon can decide between deat

Genres: Horror

360 pages, Kindle Edition

Expected publication September 22, 2026

Reviews

[Sidney]

i'm going to be honest i didn't read anything past "When the keeper of a demonic hell hole falls in love with the perfect sacrifice..."

[C. Sinclair]

“Dear Sir, the night is drawing near. I can no longer tarry here.”

4.3/5

When the first page of a book manages to sink the atmospheric hooks of dread into me in the same breath that it makes a lighthearted Chaucer reference, I'm locked in. The Brink is haunting, evocative, and distinctly Gothic, with a bygone setting rendered through meticulous research and thoughtful attention to detail. Sophia Adamowicz's integration of Old English is particularly striking, woven so seamlessly into otherwise modern and accessible prose that the historical distance of the setting never becomes a barrier to immersion. The result is a story with something for nearly everyone: historical fiction, romance, true crime, and horror fans all find their place here without any one element overwhelming the others. It is a crowd-pleaser as much as it is a crowd-unsettler.

The Brink's fear factor is stunningly effective because of its restraint. The story that unfolds is deliciously disturbing without relying heavily on gore or overt horror, instead cultivating an atmosphere of unease that ebbs and flows like the tide in a seaside cave. Adamowicz's prose oscillates deftly between esoteric horror and sly languidity, maintaining a steady current of tension that permeates the story, picking up effortlessly after tonal changes or quieter passages and resuming with an organic sense of dread that had never quite left. To distract be distracted from suspense without truly leaving it is a remarkable feat. The characters are equally compelling, written with enough complexity and ambiguity that I never felt entirely certain I understood any of them — and I suspect that uncertainty is precisely the point. Not every question receives an answer, but not every question needs one, and some may not even have one. The conclusion feels earned, if somewhat abrupt, and the resolution is satisfying without attempting to explain away every lingering mystery.

A beautifully unsettling story with an unusually rich historical texture, Adamowicz's page-turner has left me thoroughly immersed, pleasantly disturbed, and ruminating on its purposely unanswered questions. Not all atmospheric horror stories are created equal, but The Brink is certainly one that lingers. I have felt it following me since the last word, catching glimpses of it from the corner of my eye like a shadow that might, in fact, be my own.


Thank you to NetGalley and Ruadán Books for the advance reader copy of this fantastic book in exchange for an honest review - I sincerely enjoyed reading it and look forward to the next.

[Demetri Papadimitropoulos]

Even Hell Has Family Obligations: Sophia Adamowicz’s “The Brink” and the Trouble With Doing What You’re Told
A ravenous pit, several bad decisions, one complicated romance, and generations of Vernon family mythology make for a folk-horror novel in which obedience proves considerably more dangerous than disobedience.
By Demetris Papadimitropoulos | September 5th, 2026

Deep enough holes acquire theology. In Sophia Adamowicz’s “The Brink,” Elden Hole is a real Derbyshire chasm and, for the Vernon family, a moral machine: feed it human lives and Peak Forest may be spared. Jane Vernon inherits this creed with poverty, suspicion and the peculiar misery of loving the people who enforce it. Adamowicz’s sharpest move is not to expose the family legend as nonsense. Something does seem to live below. The more troubling question is what happens when a frightening truth becomes permission, when inheritance ceases to explain cruelty and begins licensing its repetition. If the Hole must be fed, then murder can be dressed as maintenance, obedience as virtue, fear as proof.

Early in the novel, Jane helps lure a travelling merchant, Thomas Mace, away from an inn. Her sister Mary kills him; the siblings rob him; his body goes into the Hole. Jane is appalled without being innocent. She knows enough to feel guilt and not enough, or not yet, to understand guilt as a demand for action. Bloodline, curse, village safety and loyalty to Will and Mary have congealed into one household argument. “We have no choice” is less a fact than the sentence that keeps everyone moving. Jane’s moral awakening therefore cannot take the easy form of discovering wickedness around her. She has already helped it along. What she must discover is that recognizing coercion does not erase the part of the deed that still belongs to the person who performs it.

Missing Sarah Pulmer opens the first fault line. Isaac Latimer arrives looking for his cousin, a young woman last seen travelling through the Peak country with an older lover. Jane joins the search partly from conscience and partly because Isaac, prosperous, educated and irritatingly capable of imagining elsewhere, embodies freedoms Jane has barely had the means to picture. Their route through inns, caves and the famous Wonders bends steadily back toward her own family. A necklace, a letter, a bloodstained hood and a succession of evasions make silence costlier with every mile. The mystery is not especially intricate. Its pressure is intimate: each new clue turns what Jane withholds from Isaac into another small betrayal. Adamowicz is less interested in the clean click of detection than in the ugly lag between knowing enough to speak and finding the nerve to do it.

Even Isaac’s name belongs to that pressure. Isaac is also Isabella. Masculine dress begins as practical protection for travelling alone, then becomes recognition: bodily ease, old memories, the startled feeling of meeting someone who has been present longer than the disguise. Adamowicz avoids the dreary little courtroom in which one identity must be pronounced authentic and the other counterfeit. By the end, Isaac and Isabella coexist. Jane does not have to solve them. She has to stop demanding singularity as the admission price for love. The parallel with her own predicament is quiet but exact. Jane too has been told that blood, name, family and fate add up to a finished self. Both characters must learn that inheritance can be real without being sovereign.

That is where “The Brink” moves beyond superstition into a struggle over jurisdiction. Grandam tells the Vernon children what their blood requires. Peak Forest decides what the Vernons are for. Sarah imagines Thomas as escape. Jane treats violence as hereditary. Isaac reconstructs Sarah from memories affection has edited. Later, neighbors and magistrates turn Jane’s experience into an official version. Accounts preserve and distort. They comfort, discipline, recruit. Repeated long enough, they stop sounding like interpretations and start sounding like law. Adamowicz is especially good at showing how coercion acquires its dignity: not by announcing itself as coercion, but by arriving disguised as duty, protection, tradition, necessity, the thing decent people simply do.

Rather than rescue Jane by proving that enlightened skepticism was right all along, the supernatural remains stubbornly inconvenient. Elden Hole is not a rustic error waiting for Isaac to correct it with a raised eyebrow. Something kills. Something bargains. Something speaks in a voice assembled from what it has consumed and eventually names itself as hunger. Its demand is perfectly impossible: everything. If the danger were imaginary, Jane would only need to disbelieve. Because the danger may be real, she has to learn something harder. Accuracy does not confer obedience. A monster can exist and still have no claim on your ethics. This is the book’s most fruitful refusal: the old story does not have to be false before Jane is permitted to stop serving it.

In Jane’s mouth, none of this sounds particularly philosophical. Her intelligence is tactile: mud, ale, torn skin, bad smells, animals, food, sex, cloth, weather. Adamowicz turns terrain bodily and bodies geological. Hills rise like fists; caves become bowels; darkness flows; Elden Hole is mouth, wound, grave and gullet. Long before the Spirit calls itself hunger, the imagery has taught us to experience Derbyshire as something digestive. The erotic horror complicates the appetite further: fear shades into desire, disgust into surrender, and the Spirit’s touch frightens partly because Jane cannot keep bodily pleasure on the morally respectable side of the room. Her humor helps. Jane can notice cosmic terror and somebody’s bad manners in the same breath, which keeps the horror at human height. Even Hell, she suspects, may have poor accommodations.

Period texture arrives through Jane’s mouth before it arrives through historical display. Her regional idiom creates distance without making the reader hack through linguistic bracken, while Isaac’s chapters are more educated, rhetorical and self-interrogating, often addressed directly to the missing Sarah. Jane lives inside inherited belief; Isaac initially holds belief at arm’s length and turns it around in the light. In the caves, Jane says that in the Peak country “our stories are sinkholes”; Isaac warns that people can let histories determine the future. He sounds glibly certain, she sounds fatalistic, and the book spends hundreds of pages arranging circumstances in which each has to surrender part of the argument. His reason can become vanity; her superstition contains experience he does not possess. Neither gets to keep the easy version of the other.

Adamowicz’s 34 chapters keep truth distributed unevenly. Jane dominates. Seven Isaac chapters arrive at intervals almost like depositions written by someone who does not yet realize he is also a witness against himself. He idealizes Sarah, conceals parts of his own life, misreads Jane and assembles plausible theories from partial evidence. The reader repeatedly knows more than either narrator separately and less than the truth their accounts could form together. “What happened?” becomes the less interesting question. The sharper one is who has mistaken which fragment for the whole. That formal imbalance matters: we spend long enough inside Jane’s inherited logic to understand its emotional coherence before Isaac’s chapters puncture it, and long enough with Isaac to see that the outsider’s clearer view is not the same thing as omniscience.

Pressed to its limit, that uncertainty ends in the cave with Will. He has killed Sarah, a lost and injured woman he decided could serve as an offering. Later the supernatural presence urges Jane to kill him. Revenge would be narratively efficient and emotionally legible. Jane refuses it. She sees two facts at once: the man before her has done unforgivable things, and the child he once was had violence planted in him by Grandam before he could understand what was being planted. Understanding does not acquit him. It prevents Jane from pretending that another killing would clean the ledger. The distinction is the novel’s hardest-won moral intelligence. Causes matter. So do consequences. Sympathy may enlarge judgment without dissolving it.

After Jane refuses, brother and sister decide to confess. Will then reaches Elden Hole and, terrified that the curse will pass to his unborn child, steps over the brink. That is the trap. For perhaps the first time, he acts against the family system; he does so by giving the system another Vernon body. His suicide is refusal infected by repetition, an act of will conducted in the ritual language that ruined him. The old script survives inside the gesture meant to destroy it. Will’s final freedom arrives with someone else’s handwriting still visible underneath. Adamowicz is too alert to sentimentalize the act as cleansing. He chooses, yes, but he has not yet learned how to imagine choice except through sacrifice.

Dramatic force weakens when Adamowicz explains ideas her scenes have already made persuasive. The middle repeatedly cycles through Jane’s guilt, Isaac’s suspicion, another clue about Sarah, another dangerous silence, romantic approach and retreat. The circling makes psychological sense: a person raised inside coercion rarely exits it in one luminous decision. Dramatically, though, not every lap earns the distance. Rope, blood, shadows, birds and hunger often make the argument perfectly well. The explanatory sentences that follow can feel like captions under an image that did not need one. The irritation is mild but cumulative: the reader has already watched the rope tighten, then gets a small lecture on knots. This is the chief reason the novel feels longer in its middle than its material strictly requires.

If the book’s declarations about agency sometimes sound cleaner than the circumstances around them, the circumstances are the stronger half of the disagreement. Isaac insists that everyone can choose, which is exactly what Jane needs to hear. But choice comes priced differently. Isaac has money, education and mobility; Jane has hunger, limited literacy, family coercion and a village already prepared to despise her. Isabella’s freedom changes with clothing. Will was trained into murder as a child. “The Brink” knows these asymmetries intimately. Its neatest declarations about self-possession know them a little less well. Jane’s awakening works because the world has made agency expensive; the rhetoric occasionally risks making the transaction sound cashless.

More alive is the romance because intimacy raises the moral cost instead of cancelling it. Jane’s love for Isaac/Isabella is not a little gate marked ESCAPE at the edge of the horror. It makes deception uglier. When Jane finally produces Sarah’s bloodstained hood and admits what Will did, she must also confess her own role in Thomas Mace’s death and robbery. Love does not convert culpability into a misunderstanding. Isaac recoils. The relationship survives because truth is allowed to endanger it. That matters. A lesser version of this story might have used romance as Jane’s proof of goodness; Adamowicz instead makes it another place where goodness has to be tested.

If Sarah is the book’s most consequential absence, the cost is how little of her belongs solely to her. Isaac remembers her. Ruth grieves her. Thomas romanticizes her. Jane imagines her. Will explains her death. She remains vivid in flashes, adventurous, bookish, hungry for the wider world, but the plot asks her to function as clue, loss, motive and proof at once. The design is legible, but the imbalance remains. Sarah becomes the person everyone knows in pieces, while the people doing the piecing receive fuller dramatic lives. For a novel so interested in who controls a story, there is some irony in how often Sarah’s story must be carried by other mouths.

The legal ending exposes one last uncomfortable advantage. Jane discovers responsibility just as money begins making responsibility negotiable. She accepts imprisonment because she has stopped treating explanation as innocence; then Mary helps neutralize a witness and Isaac’s resources make the official record more pliable. Moral accountability and legal punishment are not the same thing, and wealth has always discovered doors where poverty finds walls. Even so, the mechanism releases the novel from a corner it had drawn with admirable severity. Jane’s rescue persuades the heart more readily than the machinery. The untidiness is intellectually defensible, but it is also convenient, and the review would be dishonest to pretend otherwise.

Returning twenty years later is what keeps the ending from becoming simple reprieve. Chapter 34 belongs to Isaac. Jane has survived, but survival has not polished the past smooth: she refuses to return to Peak Forest, and the life she and Isaac/Isabella have built remains only partly legible to those around them. Sarah is mourned rather than redeemed. Elden Hole remains. Most importantly, the murders have already become local folklore, dates and relationships crushed into a lurid version that pleases the teller more than the facts. Isaac corrects it and discovers that correction scarcely matters. Twenty years have been enough to turn private catastrophe into pub lore, which is funny in the bleak way local history often is: accuracy loses to the version with better scenery.

Once Isaac comes back, the trap changes owners. The Vernons spent generations imprisoned inside an inherited account; almost immediately after escaping it, their own lives begin hardening into one. Even the surrounding land has changed authors. Royal boundaries have vanished, villagers carve out ground once claimed by the Crown, and the Hole sits behind a dry-stone wall that future visitors will dismantle stone by stone while repeating the murder tale. What once looked permanent, whether royal property, family duty or the socially permissible shape of a life, proves historical after all. Repetition can acquire the force of permission. It can also lose it. That reversal gives the coda more than retrospective charm; it changes the meaning of everything that precedes it.

Placed near Kay Chronister’s “The Bog Wife,” “The Brink” shares the machinery of inherited covenant and land-bound obligation, while Rosie Andrews’s “The Leviathan” offers a useful neighbor for its seventeenth-century collision of belief and rational inquiry. Jane, however, gives Adamowicz’s book a harsher moral grain. She is not trying to discover whether evil exists. She is trying to decide what responsibility looks like after learning that evil can be inherited, loved, feared, explained and still enacted. That keeps “The Brink” from becoming a parable with prettier mud. Its distinction lies less in inventing unprecedented folk-horror materials than in arranging familiar ones around a heroine whose conscience has already been dirtied before the reader meets her.

Outside 1642, its strongest relevance is also its quietest. Families, communities and institutions still hand people accounts of harm before handing them the language with which to challenge those accounts. Adamowicz does not need the seventeenth century to masquerade as the present. The historical distance is more useful than that. It lets coercion show its changing costumes: tradition, duty, protection, blood, necessity, the way things have always been. The book is at its most persuasive when it refuses to pretend those costumes are flimsy. People wear them because they keep out the cold. That does not mean they cannot also hide a knife.

Uneven through its middle stretch, “The Brink” nevertheless knows exactly where its final pages must leave us. For me it lands at 85/100, or 4/5 stars. The prose has bodily wit, the central relationship complicates rather than decorates the horror, and the dual narration turns incomplete knowledge into form. The deductions are real: repetition, occasional over-explanation, Sarah’s restricted autonomy and a legal escape whose gears show. What remains is a strong debut whose intelligence is most convincing when it trusts image, consequence and contradiction. It has enough mud under its fingernails to resist becoming merely tasteful.

Long after the bodies, confessions and bargains have settled, Isaac stands again near Elden Hole and senses that some unknown Something may still move below. No proof arrives. The rooks call elsewhere; ordinary life keeps making noise; he turns from the abyss and walks toward Winnats Pass. The monster need not be disproved, defeated or even named correctly. It only has to lose the privilege of telling you where to stand.

[Candice HappyCatastrophy]

Thanks again to #netgalley for letting me read this refreshingly horror filled historical fiction book! It was a page-turner!

This book is sometimes labeled as queer horror, but the queerness unfolds exquisitely slowly and it’s right in front of your eyes before you are even aware. The horror however, comes at you like an out of control high -speed train hurtling your direction from page one and never lets up. And it’s that undercurrent of dread and fear of “what’s going to happen next??” that bumps this book to a 4 star for me.

I loved our main character, Janey, who has grown up in a rapidly deteriorating family caught in a vicious, generational deal with a devil who requires human sacrifice in order to keep her from destroying the village. Set in 1642, there are plenty of folks willing to believe in this dark spirit and be grateful for the sacrifices this family has made to keep them all safe. But this time, the Dark Spirit wants something more and what’s remaining of the cursed family must make some disturbing and heart wrenching decisions.

I appreciate the complicated characters Adamowicz crafted, and how she tried to show the many faceted sides of these characters going through extremely difficult times, but I found myself confused by their behaviors and actions. It didn’t feel like deeply complicated characters to me but more like Jekyll/Hyde choices where the different aspects within each character were just TOO different. Characters would randomly do things or say things or abruptly change in ways that didn’t make sense to who they were in the previous chapter. I was often confused by these decisions and it made it difficult to feel invested in any of them because it seemed their choices and behaviors were written to further the plot….not because they made sense for the character.

Isaac and Will were the most confusing for me. Their behavior and choices flip flopped so much that by the time I reached the ending I had no idea who they really were. And I sort of didn’t care.

But sacrificing cohesion and continuity in the characters for plot development pays off in that this is a WICKED plot! I’ve never read a plot line such as this and it was delightful to read the author’s note and find out this is based on a real life historical site, surrounded in mysteries and hauntings, that one can visit today.

I did enjoy the read and found the storyline sticking with me and running continuously in the back of my skull while I was not actively in the book. I was so hoping the ending wouldn’t disappoint and it didn’t! Although it wrapped up rather neatly, tied up in a satisfying bow in the last few pages, it was still an ending that worked for me. I just wish the pacing was a little more evened out. There could have been a lot more time spent on the ending resolving itself and a lot less on various drawn out escapades earlier in the book.

The pacing issues and inconsistent characters feel like a rookie writer to me and could be smoothed out with better and more aggressive editing. And I do hope Adamowicz does reach out to peers or experienced editors to really push her to the next level of writing because I feel she has extreme potential for being a stand out, award winning, author of novels in the horror genre.

This book is worth reading and might just take up residence rent free in your head, too. I will be reading more from this author for sure!

[Birch]

3.5, rounded up in acknowledgement that this is the author's debut novel.

Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC of The Brink!

The Brink is a blend of historical fiction, folk horror, and queer romance. It takes place in the 17th century English country side and follows a few weeks in the life of Jane Vernon and her siblings. The Vernon family are the custodians of Elden Hole, a natural pothole that is home to an ancient and ever hungry evil. The Hole demands its due in sacrifices, leaving the Vernons' to commit terrible acts that have made them outcasts in their village. When Jane meets the kind and mysterious Isaac, a merchant from London, she agrees to help him on his quest to find his missing cousin. The two form a friendship that quickly begins to unravel as they begin to discover the other's secrets, all while the evil of Elden Hole looms closer and closer.

At 600 pages, this book felt longer than necessary. The pacing wasn't consistent and the characters didn't feel as distinct as I would have liked. There was a lot of exposition with very little narrative pay off. The entire story could have been told in 150 less pages, at least, and I don't think much would have been lost in the way of literary value. In regards to the characters, there was a lot of ambiguity. Isaac switched up a lot and it was hard to get a read on him as a person. I wanted Jane to be a stronger character, with more personality and drive. She never stopped being a doormat for other people, especially her brother.

Now, for what I loved about this book: The Brink is a strong debut from a clearly talented author. It's atmospheric, evocative, and well-researched. For what it lacks in character development, it makes up for in setting. Adamowicz really brings the 17th century northern English country side to life and I felt myself imagining the landscapes very clearly. Elden Hole, the Devil's Arse, and other places referenced are real life locations, so it was cool to get to search them up and see what these places look like today.

Overall, The Brink is a great debut that I think could have used a little more editing. I'd recommend this for folk horror lovers who prioritize setting over characters as their main doorway into reading.

[C]

There's a lot to admire in the premise here: a 17th century Derbyshire village, a custodian bound to an eldritch hell hole, and a folk horror atmosphere thick enough to taste. Adamowicz clearly knows this landscape and its folklore inside and out, and the setting itself does a lot of heavy lifting. A sense that something ancient and hungry is always just beneath the surface.

The central conflict is genuinely compelling on paper: a woman torn between her duty to protect her village and a growing, forbidden tenderness for the person meant to be sacrificed to keep that darkness contained. That's rich territory, and the queer awakening at the heart of it gives the story an emotional dimension beyond the horror trappings. It's as much about identity and choosing a different narrative for yourself as it is about eldritch dread.

That said, I'll be honest: as much as I liked what this book was doing, I think it's the kind of story I'd enjoy more as a visual adaptation than as a novel. Folk horror often lives and dies on atmosphere and dread built through pacing and imagery, and there were stretches here where I found myself wanting the immediacy of seeing this world rather than reading through it. The kind of story built for a slow burn TV adaptation, all fog and firelight and unease. That's not really a knock on the writing itself so much as a note on the format; the bones of a genuinely great, moody folk horror story are all here.

Recommended for readers who love slow burn historical horror steeped in real folklore, and I'd be very curious to see this adapted for screen. I think it might hit even harder there than it did for me on the page.

[olivia]

My very first advance copy from NetGalley - and what a read it was!

I don't normally read historical fiction, let alone horror, but I'm glad I came across this book. The prose is excellent, with clever use of old English loanwords and phrases, and the dialogue is natural and consistent between characters. Jane Vernon was a memorable protagonist, and I found myself enjoying her torment... which I believe the author fully intended. Much of the horror is demonstrated through the cast's interiors. The beautiful writing made Jane's deteriorating sense of morality and downward spiral enjoyable, even though she would disagree.

I did struggle a bit with the pacing until roughly 55-60% of the way in, though this is likely due to my inexperience with historical fiction and romance-heavy titles. One of the tags that piqued my interest at the beginning was a queer romance; for what it's worth, it was a good look into gender fluidity in old England, full of ups and downs (courtesy of the up-and-down leads). In the end, the prose and climax were enough to keep me from docking another star, so it redeemed itself.

I chose The Brink to get out of my comfort zone, as I'd been suffering an aversion to romance, horror, and historical fiction. For fans of the genres, it's a great read.

[Meaghan Briggs]

This was such a great folk horror! Huge thank you to the publisher for an advanced copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. This is a historical folk horror taking place in 1642 England. The Vernon family is cursed to be the guardians of a demonic entity that demands blood sacrifice, but Jane Vernon has been battling her own inner demons and is starting to wonder if the entity they are entrusted to serve is as good as her family insists. When Jane starts to fall for the next intended victim, she must choose between her duty to her family and her own heart. This story is told from a dual POV switching from Jane and her love interest Isaac. I thought the premise was very interesting and the entity was definitely creepy. The only reason I didn't rate it 5 stars was the pacing was a bit slow at times. Overall I really enjoyed this one and I think if you're a fan of folk horror or especially Adam Nevill, you should give this one a try.

[Katarina]

** I received a free digital ARC of this book from NetGalley; my review is my own, and I leave it voluntarily.

A wonderful, atmospheric debut folk horror. The prose in this book... I mean... I need Sophia Adamowicz to release more books yesterday. The writing is truly... I can't even describe it. The setting feels lived in, and the characters feel like real people (they actually have more than one defining feature). The themes of tradition vs. self are also handled quite well. The author also clearly knows her English folklore and keeps the setting feeling authentic.

I only really have one complaint, and that's the pacing. There are several time jumps backward that pulled me out of it a bit, and some that just fully confused me. The book was only tagged as horror, so I went in expecting a slightly faster pace, which is probably my fault, but the slow pace and building unease still kept me reading. Debut polish shows through in some places, but it is more than made up for by the prose and mood.

Highly recommend for fans of atmospheric historical horror, beautiful prose, English-magic vibes, and Johnathan Sims-style: quiet, building unease. This is a memorable debut, living rent-free in my head for the foreseeable future, and worth the read.

[Astraeus Rambles]

Review of an advanced copy received by NetGalley!

The Brink got me in a hold from the very beginning and I loved our main character with all of my heart. I really really wanted to like the romance especially because everything else was so fascinating to me but Isaac lost me. I’m not exactly sure why but he made me so annoyed.

The world building was amazing as well as all the stories and the village felt grounded and characters fleshed out but the timeline and how long things went on are still a mystery to me. I hate how Isaac responded to the tales he asked to hear, trust me I understand skepticism but he was so rude about it, I already didn’t like his character and it further cemented it for me. The writing style was gorgeous and the ending was amazing and it wrapped up beautifully. We love the sisters in this house.

[R.E. Holding]

Very well written and engaging from the start. My only qualm would be that it's a little long with some parts that could have been left out, and there are some scenes driven forward by the dreaded "lack of communication" trope. I also got a little tired of Jane's constant pining over Isaac, but I didn't hate the romance.

Maybe this is a little spoilery, but there was a point where I was getting disappointed that there wasn't more activity regarding "offerings" to the Elden Hole. After a while, I began to look at the story as more of a cursed family and how it tears them apart. I felt bad for Jane when her siblings seemed to plot against her, but I also felt bad for the family's reputation around the village. I still wanted more time in the Elden Hole.

Justice for Lordsmeer and Grandam!

[Gaia Amman]

A dark tale that mixes romance and lore. I found the story well written and the author's voice enjoyable, but the pacing was a bit off for me: the twist came too late, and the characters felt a bit erratic in their choices and behavior.

[ezra]

4.5 stars? Excellent folk horror vibes. I definitely thought it was a queer book going into it (and, ultimately, it is!) but had to get quite a bit into it to understand why it was marked that way. The fact that it held my attention despite being seemingly straight for the first half of the book speaks volumes. And queerness is never really a true part of the tension or conflict of the story! Which is cool! There's plenty of dark, horrific folk lore in this story to become absorbed in!! There are some parts that maybe drag on for a bit longer than they need to, but really, I don't have any other qualms!! I really genuinely enjoyed this one - I was quite entranced.

Thank you to NetGalley for the ARC