For my general, non-spoilery criticism, frankly what comes to mind first is just the style of Winterset Hollow. It felt, honestly, very pretentious. I understand that this was a purposeful choice shaped by the text's engagement with other written works and the admiration the characters have for other books, but, to me, the very formal word choice and overall sort of flowery style absolutely took away from the horror of a book. It's inherently hard for me to find a scene scary, or at the very least tense, when words like "chum" or phrases like "cowardly conundrum" are thrown in there, and the whole thing's basically written like that. It just didn't feel serious enough. Furthermore, the novel uses a LOT of very long sentences and didn't really intersperse enough shorter sentences to create a good sense of tension in my opinion. For whatever else Winterset Hollow wanted to achieve, I expect a horror book to at least try and scare me, and this stylistic choice not only stopped it from doing so but sometimes even felt silly.

I will also say that the text tries at mystery, and that I just wasn't very drawn into the story and its mysteries. This might've totally been because I wasn't enjoying it overall, but I just wasn't all that invested. Also, and I know this because I made a note of it in my reading journal, I absolutely guessed one of the major twists on page 46. Yes, I want an author to leave me hints about the mystery so I can start piecing it together, slowly but I shouldn't be able to get it that early. I don't even think I'm very good at solving mysteries, either. 

In terms of character, I enjoyed the main trio but wasn't overly invested in them. I definitely liked Mark and Caroline a bit more than Eamon, though, which makes it a bit harder to root for him as a protagonist. Also, every human character who wasn't those three felt extremely shallow. I understand wanting to use those characters to represent different sorts of like, idealization of literature or things along those lines, but it makes for a boring fight for survival when I couldn't care less about them.

Okay, now for my absolutely biggest problem with this book and the main reason for such a low rating, which obviously includes spoilers:

While I had my suspicions throughout, there's absolutely no doubt by the final quarter that Durham is paralleling the displacement and killing of the animals of Winterset Hollow with the real-life genocide of indigenous people in America. This is clear in the way that the coming of Addington and his people is described (I believe Finn literally comments on never having seen a white man before), there's a bit on page 248 where Finn describes a younger animal coming to his father as "a young brave," and the Barley Day Feast is clearly meant to be a representation of Thanksgiving, and particularly the way that it's lied about today.

Now, it's clear that Durham is absolutely condemning this colonization and representing it as a great tragedy. In particular, it's pretty clear that he's intentionally criticizing the way the myth of Thanksgiving has been retold as a nice, happy story rather than the beginnings of horrible atrocities enacted by colonizing Europeans. He's absolutely trying to criticize these things! I just don't think he succeeds. To be clear, I am a white American and therefore my perspective on this is limited (I am also assuming that Durham himself is not Indigenous, my views on this would absolutely change if I found out otherwise).

Personally, I think representing indigenous people through talking animals is always going to be A Choice. No matter how likeable and sympathetic the animals of winterset hollow are, it feels a little bit weird and dehumanizing to make this choice, no matter how it's handled. And as for that handling... A large part of Winterset Hollow's horror derives from the human characters desperately trying to survive attacks from these talking animals. They are the characters that our main characters must evade and fight, who we're meant to be scared by, even though they're meant to be relatively sympathetic. Again, I think Durham does a good job of characterizing the animals--they were absolutely some of the most interesting characters and the ones I personally enjoyed the most--but that doesn't erase the fact that they are largely just the antagonists in one way or another. Also, y'know, they all die at the end! That's a pretty significant factor here, along with the fact that our white protagonist survives, having bested them. Furthermore, it feels like the suffering that the animals endure, particularly in scenes like those where the stuffed remains of all their families are revealed to be in Addington's attic, are sometimes used for sheer horror and shock value, which would be fine if they weren't very clearly being used as an allegory for indigenous people. As it is, these moments go from gruesome-in-a-fun-way to just disrespectful. I also just feel like this (presumably) white man using the real tragedy of colonization as a backstory for his horror book is not a great move, and at worst feels exploitative. This is ironic, considering the way Durham is obviously trying to make a point about the warping of the Thanksgiving story and how narratives can be a tool of oppression! 
 
Again, I think a huge part of this poor handling stems from Durham's attempts to make the pretty clear-cut commentary that colonization was extremely cruel and that Thanksgiving has been horribly misrepresented as a tool for oppressive systems not mixing well with the horror aspects of the novel. Once that comparison is established, the horror elements just make things feel messy and thoughtless at absolute best, and both callous and racially charged at worst. Like, death is the only solution for the animals of winterset hollow that Durham presents here--so what does that say about the very real, very alive indigenous people continuing to face the repercussions of colonization today? 

Overall, I could've put up with a bit of pretentious word choice or somewhat a weak sense of actual horror, but the undeniable connection to real-life colonization, rather than enriching my reading of the text, opening my eyes to a new perspective, or driving home the inhumanity of the rewriting of history, instead just ruined this book for me. I think Durham's intent was absolutely to condemn colonization and the idealization of the "pilgrims" and all that, I don't think his intentions were bad, but I doubt in the first place if this was a story that was his to tell and to exploit horror from. Like I said, I just don't think it's handled well enough to actually work, and instead makes a lot of the horror elements feel... gross. Ultimately, by not quite committing to either, it fails as both horror and allegory.