Review - The Essence by Dave Hutchinson

The Essence

Dave Hutchinson
Newcon Press, 9 December 2025
Available as: HB, 274pp, PB, 274pp, e   
Source: Bought
ISBN(PB): 9781917735148

It's always exciting to see a new book from Dave Hutchinson and The Essence is one of his best. 

This was part of my Christmas present to myself for 2025 and I enjoyed it loads.

Michael is an economist, working for a covert branch of the UK Treasury. After he suffers a breakdown in the office, he's placed in a private hospital to recover. A spooks' hospital, you might call it.

Hutchinson's good on institutional shabbiness - the atmosphere of the hospital, a place with decent treatment, if uninspiring food, but a definite atmosphere of have been left behind in the late 20th century, is nicely evoked. So, on his discharge, is that of his office, on a shabby cut-through behind Oxford Street. 

He's also good when portraying Michael's struggle to retain normality and his measured steps back to independence, with the help of a social worker, Jo. The book leads the reader to understanding something of Michael's past, of what's missing in the cold little house to which he returns from hospital, without over-labouring its point. It's a nice, low key exploration of (part of) a life, taking drama and interest from everyday events and routines. 

Even without major incident, this part of the story was a joy to read. Major incident is coming, however, when Michael is unexpectedly sent to Amsterdam to investigate an issue with his office's Dutch counterparts. This is where the story slips, seamlessly, into what one might call "spook mode" although it's important to understand that Michael sees himself as an economist, not a spy. Nevertheless, he's forced to think differently once it emerges that he's sought after by various factions of an international conspiracy. They all believe that he has knowledge of something called "The Essence", a mysterious and contradictory supernatural phenomenon of which he's never heard. 

The story then takes Michael across Europe, both feeling and negotiating with the different flavours of "Essencehead" while trying to understand just what he's involved in - and why. For man who's recently been hospitalised with mental health issues, the sheer preposterousness of what's stumbled on seems a real danger to his grip on reality. But evidence mounts that the Essence is a real thing, and then Michael has to question why everyone things he knows something about it.

The Essence is a combination of thriller, horror and espionage that will transition in a heartbeat from the bizarre (such as the scenes with a certain dog) to the violent to the intense, all overlaid on a kind of fantastical road trip using the breath of Europe and engagement with its history to give solidity and heft to the incredible storyline.

And behind it all, there's something else going on...

This is a glorious book, great fun, gripping and satisfying. Recommended.

For more information about The Essence, see the publisher's website here.

Blogtour review - Catherine by Essie Fox

Catherine
Essie Fox
Orenda Books, 12 February 2016
Available as: HB, 287, audio, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(HB/ PB): 9781917764421

I'm grateful to Orenda for sending me a copy of Catherine to consider for review, and to Anne for inviting me to join the book's blogtour.

It is, I think, 40 odd years since I read Wuthering Heights, in the early 80s when I was doing O level English lit. This wasn't one of our set books, but our teacher was keen to make sure we read much more widely. I remember that the introduction to the edition we read made much of the Brontës' father's "Celtic" ancestry as a factor in their romantic temperament - you don't get criticism like that today.

I tend not to re-read, so my memory of the events in the novel was hazy - ideal, really, for this retelling since it meant I wasn't looking forward for what I knew would come next.  It also meant my sympathies and appreciation of the characters could shift, uninfluenced by the later story, the perfect frame of mind to enjoy this version.

I think it's important to recognise that in the Wuthering Heights universe there are no absolute heroes and villains, and no "likeable" characters. Everyone behaves badly, everyone is worthy of sympathy. In that respect, and others, Catherine isn't a new story, it is proper Wuthering Heights but - and here's the difference - told by Cathy, rather than narrated, in hindsight, by Nelly Dean. Essie Fox uses a rather clever device to make this possible, one consonant I think with the subtext of the original novel and which handily telescopes the 20 or so years period that the story takes to unroll, and gives a real sense of immediacy and, well, jeopardy to the events - in contrast with the hindsight-tinted perspective of the original. (And we're spared Mr Lockwood, who isn't event mentioned by name, just - in one or two places - as "the tenant").

Fox also takes the opportunity of this being Cathy's own story to enlarge on parts that Dean is only passing on from Catherine herself - who Fox makes unreliable, or at least incomplete, in what she tells her maid. This gives some space to develop aspects about which the original book is silent. For example, Heathcliff learns the truth of his background and relates this to Cathy - something that is then a significant motivation for Cathy - but Cathy never tells Nell the details. In that respect, Catherine is therefore a retelling, not the retelling - other authors could make other choices. I do think though that Fox's choices are deeply true to the novel, and in taking over the book's characters, she captures something genuine in their relationships and history that makes this more than simply a glossing of the original. The people you'll meet here are vital, human, and true to Brontë's original.

All this makes Catherine more than simply a retelling, it's a rich story in its own right. There is tragedy here, and room for pity and empathy even with the apparent villains: like Wuthering Heights itself, Catherine is something of a gale of emotion and feeling - longing, lust, hatred, regret, jealousy - and if you're going to enjoy this book you need to be on board for that. It won't suit everyone! In my view, the power of Emily Brontë's original is here in Catherine, undiminished, but this retelling addresses matters which the climate of the mid-19th century could not allow, as well as revisiting aspects where modern sensibilities raise issues, or ask questions, which the original didn't.

Catherine is a grand, sweeping read which takes nothing away from the original novel - it is, as I said, only a retelling, not the retelling, I can imagine alternatives that take different paths, but what a retelling! 

I would recommend.

For more information about Catherine, see the publisher's website here - and of course the other stops on the blogtour which you can see listed on the poster below. 

You can buy Catherine from your local high street bookshop or online from Bookshop UK, Hive Books, Blackwell's, Foyle's, WH Smith, or Waterstones. 

Review - In This City, Where it Rains by Lyndsey Croal

In This City, Where it Rains

Lyndsey Croal
Luna, 4 February 2026
Available as: PB, 129pp, e   
Source: Bought
ISBN(9781915556691PB): 

In a modern city that is, and is not, Edinburgh, a young woman, Maggie, lives alone and sees ghosts.

Specifically, Maggie sees ghosts in the rain. They have little or no substance in the dry, so she mainly encounters them on the way to and from her job serving whisky cocktails in a basement bar. They have become familiar to her.

Nobody else can see the ghosts - until one day, somebody can.

And then, the ghosts begin to ask Maggie for help.

I loved the way that In This City, Where it Rains opens as a seemingly mundane story - what is more normal in Britain than a walk in the rain? - and then gives us a dash of the uncanny. We see Maggie's relationship with her boss Angus, who's missing his dead brother. Banter over tips, chat on a quiet evening in the bar. Then we see that Maggie perceives... something... in Angus's brother's favourite chair.

A dash of the uncanny. Then a bit more. And then In This City, Where it Rains goes full-blooded horror. Maggie finds herself, somehow, at the centre of a web of mysteries - and in danger. Is the prolonged rain actually natural? What lies beyond the city? And how does it link to the strange, decaying Tair House?

Maggie's existence in the city seems to take place mysteriously on two levels - she does the normal things that are needed to maintain existence in a service economy, and suffers the alienation attendant on that - expressed powerfully in the rain. Where are the rest of her family? What became of them, and what was the "accident" her granny told her about? 

Yet, at the same time, Maggie is sought, eagerly sought, by mysterious players in the haunted city. It's not just her life that seems to be on hold, there are others, only half-awake, who need her.

I really enjoyed In This City, Where it Rains. Both naturalistic and creepy, it's a story that (I write, as the rain pours down outside) powerfully inhabits its own metaphor, pointing both to a state of stasis and, perhaps, to awakening and renewal.

Strongly recommended.

For more information about In This City, Where it Rains, see the publisher's website here.

Review - The Place Where They Buried Your Heart by Christina Henry

The Place Where They Buried Your Heart

Christina Henry
Titan Books, 4 November 2025
Available as: PB, 352pp audio, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(PB): 9781835412640

I'm grateful to the publisher for giving me access to an advance e-copy of The Place Where They Buried Your Heart to consider for review.

As a reader I'm endlessly fascinated by the way that books reflect their authors' own worlds both overtly - a book set in the US will of course use different language and make different assumptions from one that takes place in the UK - and in terms of tropes, attitudes and lifestyles.

Take for example that idea of the scary old house in the neighbourhood. The run down place the kids dare one another to go into at midnight. That is very much a US thing, I think, I don't think it occurs much in UK writing (or indeed real life!  - I live in the UK and always have done). Perhaps this is because here a, say, 100 year old abandoned property is not really old. That is, it may be old enough to be squalid but not scary. Not far away will be an 800 year old church or a 500 year old Tudor cottage, and those are old old. 

Or it may be because we have less space and the idea of an abandoned mansion up on the hill is less plausible. Given house prices it probably won't be empty anyway.

So I approach a book like The Place Where they Buried Your Heart with interest, wanting to see not just how the story unfolds but how this trope works out in the context of the plot - how the idea is justified and where it leads, what it means in the context of a modern urban setting for there to be such a feature. And perhaps most of all, why the authorities don't just do something when kids begin disappearing?

In this book, Jessie Campanelli's life is entwined with such a house. It is her fear and her shame. Early on in the story, she suffers a loss when she dares her little brother Paul to go in the house, largely to get rid of him when she wants to sulk. Of course Paul vanished and Jessie is left with a burden of guilt. Henry then very subtly, very cleverly, shows us how that guilt warps Jessie's subsequent life and how Paul's loss breaks her family - first her father, and then her mother. Setting aside the fantastical element this is a very human story of loss and grieving and pain as we see the Campanelli family fail, and Jessie grow up, living in the same familiar neighbourhood as it changes and the old people move out and new people move in.

All that time, the empty house sits, untouched, waiting, malign. It's a like or there-not-there presence both in Jessie's life - at one level it haunts her, at another she puts it out of mind. The house is also present but not present in wider affairs: yes, Jessie's neighbourhood is gentrifying and the site must be valuable, but a string of... accidents... convinced everyone to leave well alone.

Except the kids.

And now Jessie's got a daughter of her own...

I found this a satisfying, fun and creepy novel on many levels. Jessie's a perfect t rounded character in herself, seeking to make something of her twisted life, a determined fighter who takes no crap from anyone - not her dead-end boyfriend, not that creepy house, not the few bad neighbours (there are many good, supportive ones). Watching her cope with grief and guilt is painful and sad, but she's a survivor.

A book I'd strongly recommend.

For more information about The Place Where they Buried Your Heart, see the publisher's website here.