In the Wine Dark Sea

The Winter Folk by Jennifer McMahon meets The Haunting of the Hill House (the Netflix series) in this tale of paleoanthropological terror that plays with the famous theory of the uncanny valley by Masahiro Mori.

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PhD student Giselle Brown returns to her childhood hometown to complete her dissertation in peace, hardly expecting anything surprising to happen. It already muddled her life as it is; she doesn't need more trouble to spice it up. But when the bones of a human cadaver are discovered by the local anglers, which turn out to be the remains of her long-lost mother, Giselle's life is thrown into a tumult.

Twenty years ago, Giselle's mother, Julia Brown, had disappeared from their house, leaving behind a trail of heartbreak and despair. The police never found her mother, which drove her father to suicide, her older sister to turn mute and to be admitted in an asylum, leaving the full onus of raising Giselle on her grandmother. Her mother was more a legend in their house than a person who haunted their every action and Giselle's most haunting thoughts. Somewhere deep down Giselle had always sought answers to what happened to her mother and the disturbing facets of the last week she was with their family.

Now, with the corpse recovered and identified, the investigation that had once gone cold resumes upon Giselle's insistence. Yet things get stranger as the police uncover the most bizarre facts about the cadaver and the details about the last days of Julia's life. Giselle is plagued by reflections that are not quite hers, shadows that stretch too long, figures appearing at the edge of the woods close to her home and a lingering sense of being watched. Giselle doesn't know what to do. Can she really trust her mind? Or is nothing as it seems?