The Old Religion

December 9, 2019
Tom Killgannon, the hero of this uneven gothic mystery from Waites (The Woman in Black: Angel of Death), has settled in St. Petroc, Cornwall, to try to shed a former life he led in another part of England. One stormy day, a troubled, frightened teenager, Lila, takes refuge in his house—she’s a runaway, hooked up with a community of surfers living in campers on a local beach. Despite Tom’s efforts to help her, she sneaks away with his coat containing his passport and ID—proof of his new identity that Tom is desperate to get back. The search for Lila takes Tom into the heart of a disturbing plan on the part of a man called Crow to restore St. Petroc to its former glory, using the old religion of the title, a kind of druidic paganism that Crow has convinced the town’s seemingly reasonable residents is the key to future prosperity. Set in a gray, forbidding landscape, this grim novel offers a vision of what rural England could become after the U.K. leaves the E.U. Unfortunately, neither Waites’s prose nor storytelling does justice to the potential of its harrowing premise. Agent: Jane Gregory, David Higham Assoc. (U.K.).