Product Description

The Revd Merrily Watkins had never wanted a picture-postcard parish - or a huge and haunted vicarage. Nor had she particularly wanted to walk straight into a local dispute over a controversial play about a strange seventeenth-century clergyman accused of witchcraft ...a story that certain old-established families would rather remained obscure. But this is Ledwardine, steeped in cider and secrets. A paradise of cobbled streets and timber-framed houses. And also - as Merrily and her teenage daughter Jane discover - a village where horrific murder is a tradition that spans centuries.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #28992 in Books
• Published on: 2003-10-03
• Format: Unabridged
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 630 pages

About the Author

Phil Rickman was born in Lancashire. He has won awards for his TV and radio journalism, and his highly acclaimed earlier novels Candlenight, Crybbe, The Man in the Moss, December and The Chalice are also available from Pan Books in paperback. The Wine of Angels introduced the Revd Merrily Watkins, whose frightening baptism as a diocesan exorcist was charted in Midwinter of the Spirit, followed by A Crown of Lights, his previous novel. He is married and lives on the Welsh border.

Customer Reviews

Read this book!!!
The Wine of Angels is a fantastic book - deceptively quiet, with few moments out out-and-out horror; despite that though, it is still a brilliantly suspenseful ghost story. The lead character, Merrily Watkins, is very sympathetic, and well merits her own continuing series (which are all definitely worth reading). Ever since Crybbe/Curfew (Rickan's first highly-rare book) Rickman has been edging away from the fantastical in his work, but this is the first of his books which strikes the perfect medium between realism and fantasy/horror, and it's definitely the best one he's ever written. As annoyingly obvious a label as it is, Rickman's writing is reminiscent of Stephen King, but not due to it's content; it's more because of the superb characterisations which are what make King's, and Rickman's, books so good. Rickman is also especially good at conveying the setting of his novel - a sinister England/Wales borderland. Also, credit to him for introducing the amazing musician Nick Drake to more people.

This book is definitely worth a read, as Rickman is a superb author, and deserves to be much wider read than he is.

Pink Moon is gonna get ye all
Rickman seduces you into his sleepy, pastoral village of Ledwardine with promises of home brewed cider and fairies at the bottom of the orchard. Only when it's too late for the reader/listener to catch the last bus home does he scratch away the surface to reveal the sordid underbelly of English country life doused in incest, blood-feuds, rape and murder.
This, the first of the Merrily Watkins procedurals is a ghost story wrapped inside a mystery and bound tightly together with the twine of dark folklore. It also delivers a plot twist that gives the sort of jolt you would normally only expect from a gibbet trapdoor.
As always Rickman's dialogue is a joy as he fleshes out the various suicidal dreamers, quirky eccentrics and sexual predators who inhabit his strange little village. As Nick Drake, the quintessential lost soul himself, who makes an eerie cameo role in the book says - The Pink Moon is gonna get you all!

This WINE will only improve with age
After savoring the last drop of this Rickman offering, I looked back through my copy of the novel to find I had highlighted passages of text, written copious marginal comments and even affixed multi-colored page tabs throughout! I have never done this, even with King or Straub novels, so this was probably my recognition that I've set Rickman's works apart from others. Rickman's writing, in my opinion, does more than entertain; this writer consistently integrates the mythos of ritual and sacrifice, which link the temporal to the sacred, into the fabric of his stories in a way that no other contemporary author of popular fiction I've encountered thus far dares to do. I enjoyed this book so much because the characters, setting, imagery, tone and language work together so well to link contemporary "Ledwardine" to its past, just as most places and people are linked in the spiral of mythic time. One character, Lucy Devenish, understands the need to honor that link to the past through the performance of "right" ritual, a theme that, in my opinion, cannot be overdone in our world today. I think that there exists a profound hunger for ritual, albeit at times a subconscious one, as is evidenced by all the pathetic attempts at finding substitutes for what we've lost in the name of progress. Rickman so aptly captures this cultural void in his tale set in contemporary Ledwardine, and the result is an ensuing bastardized festival that is disastrous from planning stage to its tragic conclusion. The author exposes the residents of this town and their motivations for taking part in staging the festival as well as holds each character accountable for his or her involvement. I guess that's why I love this story: in a mythic world like Ledwardine, a writer can address those individual lapses of judgment and violations of cultural propriety. In the real world, we don't often get or want to see the connections between our actions and the events they set in motion. Rickman deals with these issues in ways that are not heavy-handed but are still satisfying to the reader.

Another aspect of this and other Rickman stories is the often painful and inevitable nature of sacrifice, which occurs for the ultimate good of the community. Rickman's "victims" seem to have at their cores a gentle and perhaps imperfect wisdom that becomes almost holy through their deaths. This book is no exception. Again, Rickman's consistent articulation of the psychic significance of this theme has created a unique sub-genre within the horror/supernatural genre.

The themes of ritual and sacrifice are not the only ones that set Rickman's novels apart from others. This novel and its sequel, MIDWINTER OF THE SPIRIT, both explore the mother/daughter bond as well as the maternal themes found in the mythos of the Anglican (and Catholic)Church. Rickman's "Merrily Watkins" novels have something for anyone who has ever felt that void in her or his soul or has felt the need to re-connect to that sense of maternal comfort we often find in things spiritual.

I am anxiously awaiting Rickman's new novel, A CROWN OF LIGHTS, due out this spring.