Winterset Hollow, by Jonathan Edward Durham

A very striking cover and title, don't you think?

This book was talked up in some corners of the internet as a brilliant and original dark fantasy, one of the best books they've ever read, etc. The premise is that fans of a Wind in the Willows-esque book go to visit the author's historic home, and find that the book was based on reality... and the reality is much darker than he portrayed. "Evil Narnia" has been done quite a bit, but not "Evil Wind in the Willows." And I'm always a sucker for "fans of a book interact with the reality behind the book."

Here is an excerpt from a scene early on with the three main characters eating French fries.

Eamon chose his next victim from the heaping pile of starch in the middle of the table, swiped it through the thick puddle of ketchup on the side of the plate and popped it into his mouth only to surmise that something was missing and immediately reach for the salt shaker.

"I already salted those," objected Mark. "You watched me do it. I watched you watch me do it."

"I watched you salt the top layer, but we've just eaten the top layer, so now somebody needs to salt the fries that are on the lower layer. It's really not that complicated," Eamon said with a well-intentioned smirk as he gave the newly unearthed goodness a dusting of God's chosen crystal.

They're FRENCH FRIES.

This sort of prose is very love it or hate it. I hated it so much that I'm not sure why I kept reading. I think it hypnotized me.

Eamon, Mark, and Caroline, along with some other fans they don't know, take a ferry to the island where the Winterset Hollow author, Addington, lived. They all got free tickets via a fan magazine, and they are the only passengers on the ferry.

On the island, they discover that Addington's old house is inhabited by four talking animals from the book, who invite them to join in a feast. The animals who should be small, like the fox and rabbit and frog, are human-sized.

All this takes up about the first third of the book. Spoilers I guess but it was SUPER obvious what was going to happen next.

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I was curious both about this bizarre book and its bizarrely warm reception, so I looked into it a bit. Apparently Durham is a popular social media personality, so there was probably some spillover fondness. (One annoyed review of the book wrote, "He seems like the sort of person who owns multiple fedoras.") The book was, very perplexingly, published by what appears to be a self-publishing collective... for Christian books. It is not a Christian book. I remain baffled.