Some memories fade. Others put down roots.
The Memory Tree | Heather Davey | Titan Books | 29 September 2026 |
The Memory Tree Review: Roots, Rituals and Rural Dread
Heather Davey returns with The Memory Tree, a gothic folk horror novel rooted in memory, grief and the strange authority of old places. When Kate Greenwood moves with her family to the Dorset village of Hope-under-Barrow, an ancient yew tree begins pressing the past into the present through visions, rituals and inherited fear. Davey again uses a dual timeline, pairing Kate’s modern unease with Octavia Kibble’s story in 1866. The result is a slow, atmospheric haunting with emotional weight, even if its final reveal lands less cleanly than the dread that leads to it. This is rural Gothic with roots.
Davey turns memory into an invasive force and village custom into a trap, building a rural Gothic whose roots reach deeper than its final reveal.
Old places do not need ghosts to scare us. Give them enough years, enough rites, and enough folk who say this is how things are done. The haunting can then take care of itself.
That is the ground Heather Davey works so well here. A vicar, his wife and their young son come to Hope-under-Barrow for a fresh start. Kate Greenwood finds a village full of rules that no one has thought to explain. The vicarage never quite feels like hers. An old yew tree stands by the graveyard and seems to have firm views on where its reach should end. Trees in horror rarely respect a fence. This one barely respects time.
The Memory Tree moves between two ages. In the present, Kate tries to settle into life with Ben, the new vicar. She also wants to keep hold of herself as an artist, wife and mum. In 1866, Octavia Kibble lives under the rule of her father, Reverend Phineas Kibble. She has grief of her own and is drawn to the same tree. Davey joins the two strands through memory, not just plot. The past does not sit still. It leaks.
That is the book’s best trick. The yew is not mere creepy set dressing. It is a store, a wound and a kind of moral record. Kate’s headaches and visions make memory feel like an attack. What should belong to one mind can cross into another. If someone else’s pain can enter your head, where do you end?
Davey gets a lot from that thought without raising her voice. The fear is quiet and often close to home. It works best when Kate’s loss of trust feels normal before it feels uncanny. Bad water, folk at the door, strain in the marriage and old village rites all press in. None would be much on its own. Put them together and the room seems to shrink. Worse, no one else will say the walls have moved.
One early line has Kate fear that newcomers will be seen as “ignorant at best” because they do not know the village ways. That small turn matters. The threat comes dressed as good manners. Kate is not just scared that she will be disliked. She learns that local knowledge is a form of power. The rooted know the rules. The new folk do not. No one is keen to hand them the guidebook. Folk horror has built whole farms from less.
The 1866 chapters give that fear depth. Octavia is not there just to explain an old crime. Her grief, her need to know, and the limits put on her life echo Kate’s. Yet Davey does not make the two women neat twins. Their lives rhyme more than they match. That is key. The two strands work best when the same hurt takes a new shape, not when one plot point mirrors the next.
This also marks a clear step on from The Ghosts of Merry Hall, Davey’s 2025 debut. That book used two timelines too. It made place, memory and old pain the heart of its ghost tale. Here the frame is much the same, but the reach is wider. Merry Hall itself held the dread in the first book. In The Memory Tree, the threat runs through land, church, custom and home. Davey has kept her old Gothic furniture. She has put it in the garden, where it has started to grow.
Her prose fits that move. It is rich, but it does not clog the page. At its best, it is like roots under old paving. You do not see much at first. Then the slabs lift. Davey knows that mood is not fog plus a grim word. It comes from small things used again and again. A garden. A churchyard. A glass of water. A knock at the door. Each feels safe until it does not.
The folklore gives the tale shape, but grief gives it weight. Kate and Octavia both carry pain. That pain changes the way they read the world. Memory is thus both ghost trick and human fact. What we push down does not go away. What a town keeps alive can hurt as much as what it hides. The yew makes that thought solid. It does not need a sign tied to a branch to tell us what it means.
There is, though, a good reason this stops at four stars. The last act is less sure than the long climb to it. A number of early readers have also found the main reveal too sharp, too thinly set up, or hard to buy on an emotional level. I can see why. Davey spends most of the book teaching us not to trust what we see. That means the late answers need to be exact. Some are. Some ask for more faith than the book has earned.
Kate can also be hard to hold close. Her anger often rings true. At times, though, the book pushes it so hard that care turns to distance. Octavia’s strand can feel like the cleaner line of pain. That gap does not sink the book. It does matter in a tale about one mind being breached by the past. We need to feel the person whose mind is under siege.
Still, a great deal works. The two timelines have a clear point. The village feels sealed off. The yew is far more than a creepy prop. Davey also knows where grief and old belief feed each other. Fans of rural Gothic and quiet folk horror should find much to like. This is dread built from pressure, not a head count.
Some horror knocks at the door. The Memory Tree has been under the floor for years. By the time you hear it move, the roots are already inside.
The Memory Tree by Heather Davey
A sinister Gothic folk horror from the bestselling author of The Ghosts of Merry Hall, in which a family in modern day England find their new home beset by the terrifying ghosts of the past. Ideal for lovers of gothic chillers by Laura Purcell, Susan Hill and Rebecca Netley.
When her husband, Ben, takes on his first parish in the rural community of Hope-Upon-Barrow, Kate Greenway feels like it could be a fresh start for the family. But from the moment they arrive, something just feels… off. It could be the locals, with their strange rituals and rites. Or it could be the yew tree which stands in a graveyard bordering their garden, whose presence brings headaches, visions and disturbing, unfamiliar memories that do not belong to Kate.
As she investigates the strange things happening to her, Kate begins to delve into the history and memories of Hope-upon-Barrow, and the more she uncovers, the more she risks losing herself to something deadly and ancient.
An extraordinary new Gothic chiller from the bestselling author of The Ghosts of Merry Hall.
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Tom B. Stone exists.
Who is underneath?
Nice try.
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