The meal is the sins of the one who has passed on, and by consuming it the sineater assures their soul will go to heaven. They appear at wakes and eat a light meal prepared for them by the grieving family and placed on the corpse of the recently deceased loved one. Sineaters, a tradition that made it to the states from Scotland and Wales, are outsiders, shunned by the community but necessary to its functioning. One lesson I took away from it was to fill up the car with gas before driving through Virginia and don't make any stops. If there is such a thing as the Hillbilly Anti-Defamation League, I am sure this book is on its radar.
It's really a pretty good coming-of-age story set in a grotesque situation. I guess it's a horror novel, although I wondered if Massie's publisher didn't promote it as a genre book so it would not get lost in mid-list literary fiction. And I also had the not-uncommon prejudice against the genre, or at least against anything written much later than the turn of the 20th century.īut I liked Sineater. I have always been a pro-horror film voice, but was never attracted to reading horror novels. I picked this up because it was on the Horror Writers' Association list of horror must-reads.
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