The Festival by Louise Mumford: a psychological suspense thriller – book review -

It’s a case of Stephen King’s creepy horror meets the frenzied vibes of Glastonbury as Louise Mumford whisks us away to the remote and sweltering valleys of Wales for a seasonal psychological suspense thriller in which a fun music festival turns into the stuff of nightmares.

Former English teacher Mumford – whose two gripping novels Sleepless and The Safe House were Kindle bestsellers – turns up the heat to boiling point in this tense, locked-room style trip into the heart of a darkness that threatens to engulf two naïve young women on the longest, and hottest, night of the year.

So sit back, pour yourself a long, cool glass of vino, and meet 20-year-old part-time library assistant Libby Corrigan who can’t believe her luck when she wins two tickets to the biggest event of the summer... Solstice, a much sought-after music festival which celebrates the longest day of the year.

Libby’s mother – a woman who had always been unkind and uncaring with her daughter – died from cancer only recently and after a few initial reservations about travelling to the festival, she is persuaded to go by her best friend Dawn.

Eager to escape her problems for a few days, Libby hopes a weekend of sun, fun and festivities along with Dawn will be ‘the start of a whole new her’ and that she will emerge from ‘the shadow’ that had always been cast by her mother.

But what promised to be an exciting trip quickly turns into a head-on meeting with the macabre. The Blake family who own the festival prove to be scarily weird, the scorching heatwave intensifies, the music becomes wilder, and the festival-goers are increasingly unpredictable. And when Dawn goes missing, Libby worries that something terrible has happened to her.

As Libby’s past starts to unravel and she learns more about the festival’s dark origins, she begins to fear that something might happen to her too…

With an intriguing and increasingly disturbing mystery bubbling beneath the surface, and a sense of foreboding that grips from the sinister opening chapter right through to the shocking dénouement, this page-turner is music to the ears of readers who love a high concept thriller.

Mumford’s descriptive powers bring extra intensity to an ingeniously imagined festival buried deep in the countryside where the world seems out of kilter, revellers’ phones are silenced, the music is overwhelming, and a claustrophobic atmosphere thick with youthful hormones and hedonism quickly turns poisonous when Dawn disappears.

And as the tension ratchets up, and stories about a woman called Tess Sanderson who went missing at Solstice twenty years ago swirl through the action, a malign brand of folklore is pitched perfectly against the author’s superb evocation of the rampant excitement and sheer self-indulgence of music festivals.

Add on the unsettling backdrop of angry locals, and the troubling presence of the Blake family who own and run the festival, and you have the perfect storm for a cracking summer reading escape!

(HQ, paperback, £9.99)