The other stories paled in comparison and made Eric/Merle seem like two twits who were never actually in love. The main part of the story deals with journalist Eric Seven as he travels to the Isle of The Blessed and finds himself falling for young islander Merle who he feels he has met before. Eric and Merle's story has elements of the shrieking madness of the film The Wicker Man, including a distinct undercurrent of unease and disturbing pagan rituals. The overall effect is both magical and disorientating, almost as if the reader has drunk some of the strange orchid tea that features so prominently in the novel. Beginning in 2073 on the island of Blessed, it moves back in time, with an epilogue connecting back to the book’s start.

Anyway, when he was dying he promised to live seven lives in total (why not eight or nine or twenty? year-old Sasha travels to France as a volunteer nurse in an attempt to rescue her beloved brother Tom from a terrible death.We are very soon in Wicker Man territory, with our hero doped up on the local narcotic orchid, vaguely aware that something creepy is going on around him. The language itself was nothing short of dream-like - I plowed through the entire book in one (ONE) sitting. I read Midwinterblood in one sitting, I still can't think of a single thing I didn't like, and it kind of changed my life.

But Erik changes his attitude toward David when he sees a picture of the airman's twelve-year-old daughter, Merle. Midwinterblood is a mysterious book of many parts, but each contains a few tell tale characters or scenes! The novel in its entirety is the story of two lovers, each born again in seven different incarnations on the same small island, struggling to find each other and achieve some kind of happiness together across the centuries.

I don't feel like precious hours of my life were wasted with this one, but I don't feel like they were really put to good use either. It might not be a traditional horror movie of axe-wielding psychopaths, but at its core, MIDWINTERBLOOD is a story of, well, blood. Reading Midwinterblood only confirmed what I already accepted as a fact: Marcus Sedgwick is a genius.

Inevitably, he ends up on a stone altar, the local knife-wielding high priest poised above him, ready to strike.Eirikr's words to his wife brought a tear to my eye: "I will live seven times, and I will look for you and love you in each life. It gives us a breather after the unnerving dream-like beginning, and roots us in the present day to move away from the dream state most of the novel is told in, which perhaps means it can't be as beautifully dark as the rest of the book. Getting the little snippets throughout time meant you started to get an overview and started to see a pattern of the story as a whole. The first is set in 2073, and then they work backwards, with the penultimate chapter in the Viking Era and the final one long before even that.