Sleepers

I hung out a fair bit at Barnes and Noble. So many books. Happiness. Picked up a hard cover of Jennifer McMahon's 'Winter People'. Tales of haunting in the town, of mysterious deaths. A horror story of sorts. More spooky than full-on gore.

There're two parallel timelines which eventually converge in present day. The story begins with a Sara Harrison Shea in the 1900s who saw a 'sleeper' in the form of a young girl in town who died. Her nanny whom she called 'Auntie', left her information on how to create a 'sleeper' if and when the time comes. Sara has a husband Martin, and a dead daughter Gertie. Then there's present day Ruthie, her sister Fawn and her mother Alice who live in Sara's old farmhouse in this same town. One day, Alice disappears. In Ruthie and Fawn's search for their mother, they uncover secrets of the old, Alice's role, and one 'sleeper'.

The story of a little girl named Gertie who died.
Whose mother loved her too much to let her go.
So she brought her back.
Only the world she came back to wasn't the same.
She wasn't the same.

There's a twist to the end, and that's how probably the author is rather brilliant that way. Her writing is kept simple and there's effective use of peeks into the past that allows the reader to finally understand the full horror of how Sara brought her daughter back as a sleeper who's supposed to disappear after seven days, but due to a chain of events, her dead-not-dead Gertie draws human blood within these seven days, and will now forever remain a sleeper to walk earth for eternity. The eternal sleeper then seems to require to feed on human blood every few months. Animal blood is insufficient. So technically, it could be a vampire. But in this story, the author has chosen to term it 'sleeper', with slightly different traits and human characteristics.