If you have read Kate Mosse’s first bestseller Labyrinth which sold in its millions, and the subsequent books: Sepulchre and Citadel, you will be quite familiar with the author’s obsession with the Occitania, that region of south west France the goes down to Carcassonne, shares the mountainous border with Spain and has a language of its own: Occ. Medieval all this maybe but amazingly the dialect is still to some degree alive. Also she is hooked on the history of the Cathars, a loosely Christian sect who were duallists. They believed in two Gods. The good one was concerned with the spiritual realm whilst Satan was responsible for the material world. This group aggravated the Catholic Church to such an extent that it became the mission of many who were faithful to Rome to exterminate them.
So, here is our setting for a post First World War ghost story. This is not a short story but it is certainly also not a long book. It reads quickly and easily and would be excellent to devour in one sitting on a rainy day … or a sleepless night I suppose.
It is historical fact that whole villages in this region hid in labyrinthine cave systems and when the troops could not actually fight and kill them, then they decided to barricade the entrances and simply starve the Cathars to death.
Freddie Watson, in the late 1920s, is still struggling to come to terms with the death of his brother George in World War One. Wandering Europe he finds himself in the Languedoc. He meets a girl who enables him to talk about his brother and begin to believe that he can find a way through the grief. However, it becomes apparent that nobody else knows this girl or has seen her. Did he dream her? Is she a ghost? He is so desperate to find her that he enters local cave systems, only to be devastated by what he finds.
I don’t search out ghost stories or the gothic but I enjoyed this book, as I suppose I like most of Kate Mosse’s writing.