Title: Into the Weeping Waters
Author: Lee Murray
Publisher: Self-Published
Publication Date: August 21, 2024
Genres: Horror, Paranormal, Historical
Length: 36 pages
Source: I received a free copy from the author.
Rating: 3 Stars
Blurb:
Taking the train home for Christmas eve, McKenna’s mentor, the Māori prophet Rawiri Temera, is plunged headlong into a ghostly adventure.
Content Warning: Death, emotional and physical trauma, a train accident, and a few brief descriptions of severe injuries. I will not share any gory details, but I will need to discuss these topics in my review.
Review:
Not all tragedies can be avoided.
The rules for how ghosts behave in this world intrigued me. Somehow they knew exactly what they could and couldn’t do from the beginning without anyone explaining it to them. There were a few logical hints about how they came to this knowledge, but I think it’s best to leave the logistics of it for other readers to figure out for themselves. Not every paranormal tale spends much time thinking about what it might be like to be a ghost or how clearly the recall their previous lives, so I appreciated the fact that this one did.
I would have liked to see more plot development in this short story. There simply wasn’t much of it, and what was shared wasn’t explained like it could have been even in a piece of this brief length. It almost felt like reading a few pages of a full-length novel instead of something that was intended to be a standalone work. That is to say, I liked what I read, but it ended too quickly for me to feel satisfied with what the narrator had to say about what happened.
Some of the most interesting scenes were the ones that described the aftermath of the crash. It was chaotic, of course, but the author also took the time to describe the little moments that could be seared into a person’s brain forever after experiencing such an event. Trauma can be like that sometimes, and I appreciated the way this was written. It was a little gory in a few places, but I could tell that was done to paint a vivid pictures of the horrors Rawiri was witnessing instead of to simply shock the readers.
As a quick aside before I finish off this review, this was set on Christmas Eve but it did not have a Christmas feeling to it at all. If anything, choosing such a typically festive time of the year for it only made the accident more heartbreaking.
Into the Weeping Waters made me shudder.