Anger… it can eat you alive.

Bea’s angry – more than ever, since her husband left her.
Lou’s angry – especially since she lost her job and her flat and had to move back in with her parents.
And whoever’s been murdering and mutilating the men whose bodies keep mounting up in Bea and Lou’s city – they’re angry, too.
But when Bea moves to The Gates, an exclusive new estate with a strange and troubled history, and Lou’s interest in the murders leads her right to Bea’s door, the two women find the lines between nightmare and reality, history and myth and sanity and madness blurring around them – and a primeval entity born from the chaos of creation with her own appetite for rage rising up to meet them from the ground below.

She sees them. And she’s hungry.

I bought ‘A Press Of Feathers’ four years ago after reading T. C. Parker’s ‘Saltblood,‘ a novel about evil both human and otherwise. Halloween Bingo prompted me to pull ‘A Press Of Feathers‘ to the top of my TBR pile because, amongst many other things, it has a portal/hellmouth in it that made it a good fit for the Alice In Wonderland square. 

‘A Press Of Feathers‘ is a horror novel about rage-fueled violence. It focuses mainly on the righteous rage of women who have been abused and what women might do if given the power to avenge themselves and others.

It’s an unusual novel; a minestrone of horror tropes. There’s an ancient goddess of chaos, tentacled Cthulhulian monstrosities, menacing murders of crows, a Victorian mental asylum run by sadists, a dodgy self-made millionaire who likes to create communities and then nurture conflict and a series of brutal killings and mutilations of young men with no apparent link between them. It’s a rich mixture, but for the most part, it worked. 

The story is told mostly from the point of view of two women, strangers to each other, both with rage in their hearts at the way the men in their lives have treated them, whose paths cross as they become tangentially involved in the investigation of a series of murders. I liked that the two women saw the world quite differently, but both understood the temptation to surrender to rage and unleash righteous violence. 

The story is firmly grounded in the everyday reality of life in the suburbs of Leicestershire. That’s not something that immediately suggests Gothic horror, yet its effect was to amplify the fear and rage that possess the people in the story. 

For the most part, I enjoyed the novel. I liked the melding of dream and reality, myth nd history, modern malevolence with ancient vengeance. The key scenes were intense and well-realised. The characters, good and bad, were easy to relate to. 

From time to time, I was distracted from the story by clumsy plot disclosure and what felt to me like uneven pacing. The ending also felt too tidy, given the chaos that had preceded it.