Reviews with content warning for Gore - Horseman: A Tale of Sleepy Hollow

I wish I could rate this higher, I really do. The thing is, Horseman had the potential to be good. There was some really good passages, some pretty interesting pieces. But in the end, while I still enjoyed it as a quick read, it fell a bit flat for me.

Part of it was because of the first person POV. This is entirely a personal preference, I’m just not a huge fan of it. There are very few 1st person POV books that I love or even actively enjoy. Especially because, in the case of Horseman, it seemed like it made assumptions that shouldn’t’ve been made, that there was a lot of telling that just seemed annoying.

The writing kinda melded into that, where it just seemed choppy and sometimes just…not well thought out? Not to say that the author just slapped this together real quick, but some of it did seem sloppy. There were plot points that, when the reader is given the reasoning for them, I wasn’t able to suspend my disbelief and they fell flat. And that ending just seemed…rushed? Like the author wasn't sure how to end the story.

Tied to that, there was also two or three monologues throughout the book given by various characters, and while one of them was actually pretty interesting regarding the woods and what lived there, the other two? I was completely bored out of my noggin. I ended up just skimming them till the plot started to pick back up again, tbh.

Along with that, the characters were…meh. Brim seemed like this larger than life character that could do wrong, and I know part of that was because we’re looking at everything through Ben’s eyes, but damn, even when he’s an adult, I feel like the reader is still being fed with “Brom did no wrong!” when that’s…questionable. It just got to be annoying and tedious when you go to the twentieth “Brom is so amazing!” passage in a book that truly isn’t that long.

And when it came to Ben? Ugh. His personality aggravated me, even though I know it’s supposed to (at least somewhat) because he’s a kid for most of the book. But yeesh, the self-righteousness was annoying — and even as an adult he still tried to explain it away! Like nah dude, you were a dick, the least you could do is own up to that, lol.

Katrina was just there as a “men fought to have her >:(“ plot point and as an antagonist for Ben until ope, nvm not anymore, which was also frustrating. She was just incredibly flat and the reader literally only knows her through the relationships she has with the men around her.

All the other characters? Flat, no personality outside of drab descriptions we’re given through Ben’s 14-year-old perception. The only character that was actually interesting was the Horseman, and he had the least amount of screen (page?) time! The passages about him were written so well (relatively, yes, but still), and I’m so sad we didn’t get to see more of him for a book named after him. Literally the only reason I’m rating this a 3⭐️ and not 2 or 2.5⭐️ is because of him. Out of everything else and everyone in this book, his character was the most intriguing.

But yeah, I…wasn’t a huge fan of this. Which is disappointing because there is some wonderful potential with this! It just fell flat for me, sadly.

Content Warnings

andi's review

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adventurous dark funny lighthearted mysterious medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? N/A
Flaws of characters a main focus? N/A

3.0

“horseman: a tale of sleepy hollow” was a fun addition to the original tale of the headless horseman. i really like christina henry’s take on this urban legend – it’s was an interesting follow-up to the myth, set after crane’s encounter with the horseman.

the atmosphere of the novel has the same eerie vibe that the sleepy hollow movie has – the author did an amazingly well job at crafting the small town feeling. i loved how subtly magic was woven into this town, how people accepted its existence and yet they denied the horseman’s existence. the build-up was done so, so well – the sudden appearance of headless corpses of both animals and children. i was so intrigued by the first part of this novel. however, the ending chapter made me completely lose my interest as it felt a bit unnecessary and dragged-out.

i adored how the book handled family and the unconditional love between people that share the same blood. the portrayal of grief in this novel was spot-on and i quite appreciated the commentary on losing loved ones. another thing horseman does well is ben’s character arc – we watch ben’s process of self-discovery.

i feel like the book has a tendency to get repetitive after a while. there’s a lot of back-and-forth between brom and ben about the woods and how ben should stay away from the forest – he doesn’t and then we’re back to watching these two argue again. another complain i have is the reveal – i found it lacking and not suspenseful at all. the book builds up to this big ending and then it’s not what you’d expect. maybe it’s the pacing and how the book’s structured but it didn’t work for me at all. should’ve went without that last chapter set 10 years after.

i still haven’t got the new horseman thing – how exactly did it came to be? and also why would the other creature be chill for so many years if it’s as powerful as the book made it to be? truthfully i think the book tried to do too many things at the same time with how many villains there were.

the writing was beautiful, some parts were so lyrical that i could vividly picture the scene – especially those in which ben sees the horseman and the other creatures. i read two other books by this author and i can clearly tell she has improved a lot.

overall, horseman was an enjoyable read – perfect for the spooky month! christina’s a good writer and, even if this novel didn’t work for me, i’ll definitely pick up some of her previous works.

Content Warnings

keenanmaree's review against another edition

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adventurous dark mysterious sad fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

Content Warnings

thesaltiestlibrarian's review

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dark tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

1.0

Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC. The opinions expressed herein are mine alone and may not reflect the views of the author, publisher, or distributor.

The more I think about this book, the angrier I get. A lot of spoilers coming up, so brace yourselves and bow out now if you're not into them.

HORSEMAN starts off with a grisly murder being discovered in the woods of Sleepy Hollow. The grandchild of Brom Bones is out playing with his friend when the body of a kid their age is discovered dead in the field, lacking his head and hands. This kicks off a whole rigmarole. People start blaming the Horseman, but Ben knows it can't be him. The Horseman isn't cruel. Then people are like, "Whatever happened to Ichabod Crane, anyway?" And only one person in town knows: Ben's banana-pants maternal grandfather. When two more kids drop like flies, the investigation gets more serious.

Lol just kidding. It totally doesn't.

Everyone blames Ben for the deaths because he's the one who finds the bodies.

Listen. That's the summary. Boom, done. Now we get into what made this book a mess.

The Plot
Or lack thereof, because the mystery only takes up bits and pieces of the story. I cannot describe to you what a huge chunk of this book was Ben fawning over his grandfather. The strongest, biggest, loyalest, most perfect-est man in the entire world. That's Brom Bones. And Ben wants to be just like him when he grows up. Paragraphs and paragraphs of this, even well past the halfway mark. Come the heck on, Ben, we get it. Fawn over someone else for a minute. Gracious.

And made worse by this is the fact that Ben was born as a girl, so the transgender commentary is questionable at best. It's brought up every single chapter that "I'm not a girl, I'm a boy" and that people always think Ben is weird, and Brom always refers to Ben as a boy because of how he and Katrina lost their son Bendix, and on and on and on. It's never expounded, never explored, and never wrapped up until the end--which I'll get to, cuz hoo boy.

Wouldn't you think that teen boys having their heads and hands bitten off, and their bodies literally melting shortly after, would cause the entire town to bring up pitchforks and torches 18th-century style and bang down doors in the dead of night? Nope, not in Sleepy Hollow! Apparently everyone's cool with throwing around accusations and then forgetting they need to look for some of the OTHER missing people from years before, too.

I'm sorry, what? Small-town upstate New York doesn't raise a stink over this? I'm surprised that there wasn't an entire witch hunt and people being dragged into the street to be flogged. Small-town Maine in the freaking 21st century is a nosy man's paradise. It would be even worse before crap like Facebook and Twitter.

Three-fourths of the plot is Ben running around the woods, arguing with his grandmother Katrina, telling us about the history of Sleepy Hollow and showing us next to nothing, refuting people who call him a girl, and finding corpses in the woods. And there weren't even that many corpses! I'm so disappointed that there wasn't a bloodbath.

The Conflict
Ben's banana-pants maternal grandfather is a creepy old dude who pretends to know exactly what's happening, and guess what! He totally does. But he's also a mean old codger who hates literally everyone and everything, so he keeps to himself and no one bothers him to get information. Again, small-town mobs would burn down his house if he locked himself inside it if they even suspected he might have something to do with the murders.

Some of the townsfolk raise a beef with Brom because of the guy's inaction and protection of Ben when everyone thought it was "that little witch" who was killing the boys. And to be fair, I'd suspect Brom too. He tries to calm everyone down and constantly defends his family instead of saying, "Hey, so we should find out what's actually happening so that my family isn't the main suspect pool here." But he doesn't! He just says, "Nah, not my little Ben. C'mon, little Ben, and let's go home and forget this happened."

Like...dude! Your grandchild's other grandfather is under zero suspicion, and he's crazier than a shithouse rat! Approximately zero percent of the people in Sleepy Hollow trust him, and you're worried about just going home for dinner??? How is brushing this off a good idea?! And does BEN, the one who's found most of the bodies, even attempt to find out what's killing the boys? Yes, and it's really stupid. Which leads us to:

The Reveal
Hey, remember that little issue with the original legend of Sleepy Hollow? That one guy who kinda up and disappeared and no one bothered to look for him? Yeah, that guy. Ichabod Crane. Turns out, he didn't die. He just got turned into a shadow monster with a thirst for blood, and how did he get turned into that? Oh, that banana-pants shithouse rat, of course! Schuler, Ben's grandfather, is actually a mystical creature from the Old World, and in order to pass on his legacy he needs a son. Whoops! His wife produced a daughter, cuz women are definitely capable of controlling that, amirite? Dang-flabbit, you useless female! How dare you only carry X chromosomes!

But then Bende renames herself Ben and becomes a boy, and Schuler is like, "I can work with this." And then they have one interaction a hundred pages before the final conflict.

So...last I checked, in order to train someone to take on your mantle, you need to befriend them and then actually teach them to use the powers they inherited from you. Call me crazy, I'm not a Danish warlock capable of creating shadow monsters who lust after blood. How would I know what I'm talking about?

The worst part about Ben finding out about Crane and all that is the incessant monologuing that happens before and after. First Brom goes on and on and ON about how he was the Horseman who scared away Crane, and no one is the wiser about it. Pages and pages of him and Ben riding back home in the woods, and Brom will not shut up and cut to the chase. Then Ichabod Crane reveals himself to Ben, and CRANE starts in! Paragraph on paragraph of exposition that reads tonally indistinguishable from Brom. I skimmed and missed nothing.

Why do only hands and heads get eaten? Because Crane started to eat Katrina's son Bendix, and when he saw Katrina, his love for her overwhelmed him and he ran away before he could eat the whole body. So now he's stuck eating those parts, I guess.

Why was Bendix going after Crane? Because Schuler told his son-in-law that the only way for the fever in the town to break was for Bendix to sacrifice himself to the Kludde, the Old World monster in the woods. So Bendix is like, "Sure, cool, I'll totally do that." No cross-referencing this information with his mom, who's ALSO DUTCH and would know about anything called the Kludde. Just jumping headfirst into self-sacrifice like it's noble or something.

Why did Schuler tell Bendix about the Kludde? I don't even remember, as it was never elaborated enough.

So Crane gets done monologuing and Brom shows up to find Ben, and a scuffle ensues. Crane touches Brom's chest, which starts melting away the flesh and exposes Brom's heart, and Brom gets in a single slash before he falls. That single slash is somehow enough to do in Crane, a nefarious shadow being who feeds on human blood. Okay.

The very last standoff takes place ten years after Brom's death, and it's Ben v. Schuler for the title. Ben hears the Horseman calling his name and takes off into the deeper woods to find him. Surprise! Horseman is being held in some kind of suspension by Schuler, who (GASP) is actually the Kludde! What does that mean! What does he look like! Up yours, reader, Christina Henry will never tell! Like...no, seriously. We're told that he has terrible eyes, looks darker than shadows, and has giant wings. For all we know, he could be a literal fruitbat.

Naturally, a dangerous bloodthirsty cryptid from the Old World needs to monologue. He came from the Old World (we know) to pass on his legacy, and created Crane to torment the Hollow! Commence evil laughter! But Ben wouldn't let his grandfather teach him his ways--like the old man ever offered--and is down diggety to take this guy out once and for all. Because of Ben's inherited powers, the Horseman has been real all along because Ben believed that he was real.

I'm surprised Ben didn't try to revive the Horseman's power by closing his eyes, clapping, and shouting, "I do believe in Horsemen! I do believe in Horsemen!" After the fight where the Kludde is defeated somehow (?) Ben becomes the Horseman.

Listen...

Don't ask me to explain, because I don't know how that works. The system of inheritance for magic is never elaborated upon and never even brought up until this last quarter of the book. We're told to believe all of this, but the narrative never lays down rules for how magic works in this world, or even that it exists in the first place. Monster does not always equal magic. But here, we're supposed to believe that it does and then not question why exactly zero percent of it makes sense. It's more upsetting than the "magic system" in Once Upon A Time, which is basically the Fight Club of magic systems.

First rule: don't talk about the magic system.
Second rule: you do not talk about the magic system.
Third rule: someone yells "Well, hello, pretties!", waves their hand, steals an object, you can't do the same thing to get it back cuz reasons.
Fourth rule: True Love is a magic cure-all.

I'm so disappointed. Hopes were so high for this book, but it just...crashed and burned and got eaten by Ichabod Crane. Gracious me.

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