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A review by rosekk
Horseman by Christina Henry
2.0
I've liked the author's work before, and the idea of Sleepy Hollow & it's horseman always appealed to me, so I was sure I was going to like this book a lot. Unfortunately, there was a lot that didn't work for me in this book.
The first issue was that I never found it scary, or even slightly unsettling. I never got much of a sense of atmosphere from the book, and everything I pictured was based on other iterations of the story I've encountered. The only time I had any sense of foreboding in the story was the witch accusation, which never really came to anything. But the deaths, the monster, none of that worried me at any point.
I also found the pace really off. The first half of the book is very slow, but still doesn't effectively build tension. Then there's a flurry of activity in the middle which held my attention but still didn't do much to create a sense of dread, and then it slows right down again long before the close of the story. By the time we get to the conclusion where all the questions are answered in full, I'd stopped caring much.
The thing that bothered me the most, however (and this is a bit of a spoiler), is that the story strays so far from the idea of the headless horseman so early on that it makes the horseman angle of the story feel secondary. The horseman is never headless. We know from fairly early in the story that it's not even dangerous to the main character. It's made clear form the offset that there's some other monster causing the danger, and we know from early on that the horseman is more good-guy than anything else. And the horseman isn't even central to resolving the plot. Really, the whole plot could have taken place in any spooky town, between and group of small-town settlers, and never pretended a link to Sleepy Hollow at all. I had expected this book to take the headless horseman story and examine it from new angles, but this story has it's back to the horseman's tale and is just leaning on so it doesn't have to stand up on its own.
Lastly, since the story made an effort to go into gender politics, why on earth didn't it keep the headless element to the horseman, since that would present plenty of opportunities for reflecting on identity? A protagonist trying to be accepted for the way they are, and a mysterious supernatural entity searching for a suitable head (which is to say, a suitable face) to present to the world? It just seems like such a missed opportunity.
The first issue was that I never found it scary, or even slightly unsettling. I never got much of a sense of atmosphere from the book, and everything I pictured was based on other iterations of the story I've encountered. The only time I had any sense of foreboding in the story was the witch accusation, which never really came to anything. But the deaths, the monster, none of that worried me at any point.
I also found the pace really off. The first half of the book is very slow, but still doesn't effectively build tension. Then there's a flurry of activity in the middle which held my attention but still didn't do much to create a sense of dread, and then it slows right down again long before the close of the story. By the time we get to the conclusion where all the questions are answered in full, I'd stopped caring much.
The thing that bothered me the most, however (and this is a bit of a spoiler), is that the story strays so far from the idea of the headless horseman so early on that it makes the horseman angle of the story feel secondary. The horseman is never headless. We know from fairly early in the story that it's not even dangerous to the main character. It's made clear form the offset that there's some other monster causing the danger, and we know from early on that the horseman is more good-guy than anything else. And the horseman isn't even central to resolving the plot. Really, the whole plot could have taken place in any spooky town, between and group of small-town settlers, and never pretended a link to Sleepy Hollow at all. I had expected this book to take the headless horseman story and examine it from new angles, but this story has it's back to the horseman's tale and is just leaning on so it doesn't have to stand up on its own.
Lastly, since the story made an effort to go into gender politics, why on earth didn't it keep the headless element to the horseman, since that would present plenty of opportunities for reflecting on identity? A protagonist trying to be accepted for the way they are, and a mysterious supernatural entity searching for a suitable head (which is to say, a suitable face) to present to the world? It just seems like such a missed opportunity.