I haven’t heard anything about Christina Henry’s books before. I came upon her novels by chance, looking for fantasy and horror. The title Horseman caught my eye because of the story playing in Sleepy Hollow, a town known from the same film starring Johnny Depp.
Christina Henry masterfully reinvented a new interpretation I was positively surprised about.
When a headless body is found, everyone in the village believes there’s more to those stories than just legends. Is there a Horseman riding around to kill innocent people? Or is it entirely something else, something that is lingering around town?
Never believe what you hear or see until you have the truth. That’s exactly what fourteen-year-old Ben is trying to unearth, despite her fear of losing what she loves the most.
All begins so nicely flowing along like an unhindered calm stream, I saw the first chapters as an introduction to the daily life of mystical Sleepy Hollow. Around that time the phrase Where is this story leading me to? " never left me. With every page, it got more obvious that something was coming up very soon but I didn’t expect it to be so chilling. There are some chapters in which I felt the cold running down my spine, so mesmerized that I couldn’t stop reading. That’s in my opinion exactly what horror and fantasy fans are looking for. And for others, those bloody chapters might be too much to bear.
I can’t say that Horseman and the film Sleepy Hollow are closely connected. People who have seen the film might recognize names and places, but that’s all. I see this novel as a new interpretation of a legend, a masterfully implemented fantasy horror tale with a little bit of everything in between.
