Petra's Ghost by C S O'Cinneide
I would like to than Lydia from Titan for a copy of this novel in exchange for a fair and honest review
Publisher – Titan
Published – Out Now
Price - £8.99 paperback £4.74 Kindle eBook
A woman has vanished on the Camino de Santiago. Daniel walks the lonely trail carrying his wife Petra s ashes, along with the damning secret of how she really died.
Vibrant California girl Ginny seems like the perfect antidote for his grieving heart, until a nightmare figure begins to stalk them, and Daniel's mind starts to unravel as they are pursued by things he cannot explain.
We tend to think of a particular place that is haunted – the house, the castle or the woods we tend to not think of ghosts having too much leeway over where they can go but imagine they truly haunt you were ever you go now that might be scarier and also consider that being haunted doesn’t just mean ghosts…This spooky weekend I read the excellent Petra’s Ghost by C S O’Cinneide a wonderfully melancholic road trip through autumnal Spain watching people being haunted by their pasts and making it a chillingly great tale.
Daniel is a middle-aged widower in between stages of his life. A native Irishman who has been living in the states for many years the unexpected death of his wife means he is due to return to his parent’s farm at last but two last tasks await him. The scattering of his wife Petra’s Ashes and the completion of the Campino de Santiago a five-hundred-mile pilgrimage walk across Spain. Daniel wants to walk where he and his wife never made it and also Daniel hopes it will ease his other troubles. It’s a gruelling hard road across mountains, plains and hard roads and often alone. He unexpectedly gets into the orbit of Ginny an american also keen to finish the pilgrimage and their love of weird facts and perhaps sense of loss makes then irregular travelling companions. Daniel however finds amongst the other loud, dangerous and sometimes friendly pilgrims het meets that there is also a haunting presence stirring up suppressed memories - a seemingly dead woman lurking in the background and getting closer and closer.
The atmospherics of this story are excellent. O’Cinneide has found a fantastic placing for the tale. This isn’t a religious tale but here a device to give us a place where the veil between our world and the world beyond is a lot more intertwined. Our pilgrims are hot, exhausted and undereating so perhaps what they see is just the mind playing tricks and perhaps not. O’Cinneide picks upon the idea of pilgrims having their own reasons for travelling and perhaps own sins to release so it makes sense these places are where ghosts could be seen. I really was impressed how we find out about a very different type of spectre to those we see in UK/US based fiction and O’Cinneide’s portrayal of these figures and their motivation is chilling.
I was also really impressed with the storytelling. The tale uses the autumnal setting and sense of isolation to really play on the reader’s mind. Daniel and Ginny are off the beaten track and only strange historical stops (each with their own lurid legends tied to them) all make the reader feel as if they’ve taken a detour out of modern Spain into a different and definitely more supernatural land created deliciously in our minds. Although third person narration we get slight warnings of bad times to come and revelations to be released and the whole tale has the feeling of someone whispering in your ear melancholic but captivating.
The final element are our two main leads. Daniel is fascinating trying to be funny and yet we soon find hiding a lot of pain and secrets as he lies to people and even his family on his motivations for this trip. Ginny is a similar character but one that seems a little more focused on finishing the trek and the relationship between these two discovering one another is winding and makes you worry exactly what lies in store. As much of the joy of the horror comes the character pieces as we get to know these people and their histories through conversations on the road. Having an American and an Irish citizen in a different country neither fully knows also adds a great sense of dislocation for them as they feel constantly out of their comfort zones.
This was a spectacular tale of the supernatural with a great setting and use of the legends of the place to create a truly unique story. If you’d like a ghost tale with a difference and one settling and story-telling is excellent then I strongly recommend giving this a look.
