Tatratea - Alex Woodroe
TATRATEA
ALEX WOODROE
****
From Shirley Jackson Award-nominated editor Alex Woodroe, comes an eco-horror novel of hyperactive flora, ancient manors, and the terrifying wilderness of Transylvania.
Tatratea, a manor home reclaimed by nature deep in the Romanian wilderness, has stood in isolation for decades. Researcher Errata's sole mission is to track down the strange signals coming from inside and uncover why the whole world's gone insane.
With the doors locking shut behind her, and the local flora very much determined to keep her from leaving, her sanity check protocols, voice recorder, and a bit of camping gear are all she can use to figure out what's crashed in the hedge maze, and why it's disrupting reality. Relying on her intuition, Errata must solve the mystery and escape Tatratea before it’s too late.
With an unsettling and dread-filled atmosphere, Woodroe crafts a novel about a researcher trying to make sense of the unexplainable and survive the deadly manor.
MY REVIEW
****
One of my favourite type of books are standalone Sci-Fi/Fantasy/Horror novellas. I love diving in, immersing myself in a world for a short amount of time and enjoying a self-contained story.
Errata is a researcher, sent by the Institute – the last few remaining humans on Earth, to learn more about the mysterious manor of Tatratea. She is on a mission to find out what drove the rest of the human population insane and to stop it before humanity is wiped out completely.
Tatratea starts with Errata recording a voice message to her colleague Diane. It’s a sanity test – counting her fingers, checking the time, reading a tattoo on her arm and looking at her reflection in the mirror. I loved this convention and I was excited to start seeing this baseline of normal start to corrode. The manor house of Tatratea, with its crumbling rooms and large hedge maze is dark and foreboding and makes for a perfect horror setting.
As with any novella, there is a large amount of worldbuilding to fit in a very low word count, and I honestly wish the book was a longer. I would have liked more of the build-up of the setting of the manor itself, and some more backstory on what had happened to drive people to madness, as well as more backstory about the Institute. The fact that one of her colleagues had been sent to space on a mission also seemed a little strange without additional context.
The book wraps up well to a good conclusion that still had a sense of foreboding to it. At the very end, we switch perspectives to Errata’s colleague in space and what had happened to her, which I was not expecting. This ending had a great twist which worked in tandem with the main storyline.
Overall Tatratea is a great sci-fi/horror novella – an interesting setting with an intriguing backstory. I just wish it was a little longer - or perhaps I hope there is another story set in the same universe to come! Thank you to NetGalley & Clash Books for the chance to read the ARC in exchange for an honest review.
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