Book Review: "Water Shall Refuse Them" by Louise McKnight Hardy

I adore the realm of folk horror which tends to include some far-away atmosphere of a forest, wooded area or even something like a ‘Wicker Man’ like surrounding. Only a few books can do that successfully without making it look cliché, forced or even too ‘fairy-tale’ in design. One of the books that does this folklorish atmosphere very well is Daniel Kehlmann’s “Tyll” and another one I will say that is honestly one of the best atmospheres of a novel I have read this year is Louise McKnight Hardy’s “Water Shall Refuse Them”. Now, at first when you start reading the novel, you will never guess what the title means, the penny only really drops at the end and the reason is that you have to read the whole novel to find out why the title is actually very important to make everything fall into place and to help us understand the character of Jennifer. As we delve further into the book, we realise as well that something is seriously wrong with the way that Jennifer presents herself to the reader. The way in which she behaves with her family may seem like the average arrogance of a teenager but, in fact, it is something far more disturbing and to be honest - by the end of the book you will have to make up your own mind about her character.

Jennifer, her younger brother Lorry, her mother and her father are all going up to a village in Wales for about a month and are staying in a place that just about has running water most of the time. As Jennifer begins to notice that her mother’s state of mind is getting progressively worse and that her brother is more of a bother than a brother, she also begins to talk about ‘relics’ and the skull of a bird. As Jennifer makes friends with someone odd, but alike to herself, she starts to notice more and more things, trying to remember what happened some years back - Jennifer forces herself to confront something that she thought she knew happened a long time ago. That her mother is to blame for the death of Jennifer’s younger sister. As Jennifer’s memories are scrambled and unscrambled and then scrambled once more, we get all of these narratives from different time periods and places - all whilst Jennifer descends the rabbit hole one last time to find the truth.

Written in a folkish and horrifically detailed manner, this book is both atmospheric and graphic in its descriptions and thoughts. The way in which the various themes are presented to the reader is immaculate and has a quality to it that gives off a darkness to each character of their own. Just imagine that every character has some sort of glowing black orb around them like a halo and the darker the character is, the darker the orb is as well. It is a brilliant way of presenting to the reader that most every single character in the book has something incredulously wrong with them.

In conclusion, I would love to read a book like this again because in some aspects, it reminds me of a sort of “Wicker Man” cultish behaviour book and in some aspects it reminds me of “Starve Acre” with its twisted detail of dead animals. I cannot describe how much I enjoyed this book because I practically devoured it. I couldn’t rest until it was over and until I understood every single thing that the book had to offer in terms of details on our main character. It is wondrous and so very clever.