Erin Rogers and her daughter Casey have been missing in the Alaskan wilderness for five days. Troy Spencer is determined to find his sister and niece at any cost. Once there, a local tells Troy about a loner, Bishop, a man shrouded in secrets, who may be his only hope.
As Troy sets out to find the mysterious Bishop, Casey is lost in the woods, alone and frightened, seeking help for her gravely injured mother. But she is not alone, something ancient stalks these forested trails, something evil that hungers for fresh blood.
The trio soon finds themselves caught in a struggle against time as an ancient rivalry is renewed.

IN A NUTSHELL
Great cover.Strong title. Interesting girl-at-risk-from-monster-in-the-woods-unless-a-strange-loner-can-save-her idea. 
Setting the Alaskan mountains in winter should have been a plus but was poorly realised. The plot was OK but filled with stock characters. 
‘Bishop‘ is only 158 pages long but I set it aside at 25% because the writing kept distracting me by waking up my Inner Pedant.

If you’re looking for a fast horror read about an unusual monster in the woods, ‘Bishop‘ might be the novella you’re looking for. Unfortunately, it turned out not to be what I was looking for. I set it aside at 25%.

The dramatic cover and the strong title pulled me to this novella. I was looking forward to some monster horror that would have me shivering in the winter cold of the Alaskan wilderness.

The prologue whetted my interest—instant carnage followed by a disappearance. Then everything slowed down while Troy Spencer drove to Alaska to find his sister and niece who had gone missing while camping in the Tongass National Forest. We spent nearly thirty pages on Troy looking for a guide to take him to where his sister had been camping. Yes, the local rescue teams were out in force doing their thing but Troy still wanted to head out into the wilderness, in the dark, during a snow storm, in winter, after having driven for thirty-six hours. I know I was supposed to feel sorrow for him but I mostly thought he was an idiot who was going to get himself killed and be no use to anyone.

The stock characters started with ‘Old Charlie’, an old local guy tasked by the Ranger to take Troy to find a guide. ‘Old Charlie’ reluctantly talks about Bishop, on whom all of Troy’s hopes are going to rest. 

I didn’t mind ‘Old Charlie’ being a stock character. I was up for some foreboding around the weirdness of the guy whose name is the title of the book, but this was the first point where the language used woke my Inner Pedant. Here’s how ‘Old Charlie’ reluctantly tells Troy about Bishop as they drive through the snow.

Charlie sighed and fed the old truck a little more gas. He glanced over at Troy; worry clear on his face. Sorrow made the few wrinkles that the man had changed to deep creases around his eyes and mouth. But his jaw was set, and his shoulders were strong and squared. He may be overrun with fear, but he was not about to give up. The man’s determination and strength shone through his distraught demeanor. “There’s a loner that stays around these parts, up north near the villages. No one knows much about him, but if we can find him, he will be your best bet.

I should have been focused on ‘the loner’. Instead, I was thinking: would an old guy who actually says “around these parts” have an interior monologue that describes the man sitting next to him by saying “The man’s determination and strength shone through his distraught demeanor.” I mean, demeanor? Really? My Inner Pedant was not impressed.

Then we had the scene in ‘Whiskey Pete’s’ rundown shack of a bar where Charlie and Troy went looking for Bishop. Yet more stock characters, except, these ones could have been swapped for the folks at the Alpine Inn where the travellers on the way to Castle Dracula stop and ask for directions. The description of one stock character annoyed me. Here’s how she’s described: 

…an old woman sat alone, bundled in furs, dirty mukluks on her feet. Her gray hair was neatly parted and braided in two long plaits that hung over her shoulders and her dark eyes studied Troy intently as she caught his gaze.

The furs and the hair seemed meant to mark the old woman as an Indigenous Alaskan I raised an eyebrow at the ‘dirty muklucks’ phrase. How does anyone walk to a bar through the snow and have clean mukluks? What was the purpose of describing them as dirty?

The old woman was cast as an indigenous Cassandra, forecasting Troy’s doom. That would have been fine with me. Allpart of the genre fun. Except, this is how the doomsaying was written:

“Bad forest.” She said, “Evil. You stay away.” Troy jumped slightly as the woman poked his chest with a long, bony finger. “You stay away.” She bundled herself back into her furs, her small eyes beady and stern as she stared at Troy. “Excuse me, Ma’am, what do you mean?” Troy turned more fully towards her. “Let rangers go. Safer, much safer. Bad things roam the woods.” She spoke with a heavy accent in broken English, her face almost hidden by her woolen scarf. She turned from him and headed out into the night.

Did we need the heavy accent and the broken English? Did she reach her advanced age without being able to form simple sentences in English? This felt like lazy and disrespectful writing to me. 

At Chapter 5, the focus moved away from Troy (who still had not met Bishop) and to his niece, Cassey, as she huddled alone in the woods, being hunted by something. 

I liked Cassey. She kept her head, thought things through and was determined to keep her wounded mother safe. 

I would have settled into her story but the language again got in the way. The mountain forest in winter should be almost a character in this story but the descriptions of it weren’t just bland, they were puzzling. 

The snow wasn’t deep yet as the tree cover stilted the snow from gathering too deeply on the ground, instead it covered the treetops, weighing them down with a canopy of white.

Instead of losing myself in the story, all I could think about was “How do trees stilt snow? What does stilted snow look like? “

A few pages later, when I should have been engrossed in Cassey’s effort to evade the thing hunting her, I pulled out the story again by this sentence:

Relief bloomed in her as she remembered that part of the riverbank on the far side had been wrought with rocky cliffs and caves; maybe she could find somewhere to hide there.”

I got stuck on “had been wrought with rocky cliffs”. Firstly, what teenage girl would use that phrase? Secondly, the phrase is clumsy. Thirdly ‘wrought’ seems like the wrong word. Is Cassey really focused on how the cliff was made or on the shelter that it offered?

That was when I decided to set the book aside. If I continued reading, it seemed likely I’d keep being thrown out of the story by the prose and I knew I’d get less and less tolerant the more often it happened. 

If you don’t have an Inner Pedant interrupting your reading and destroying the flow of the narrative, you might have fun with this novella but I’m moving on to something else.