The Haar is a folk horror book written by David Sodergren which takes place in a small fishing town called Witchaven in modern-day Scotland. You will read about how nature decides to fight back against man’s ability to try to civilize and destroy nature along with interesting relationships that this brutal force of nature is able to develop with a certain person who is trying to preserve its traditional beauty.
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We will now get into a very brief summary of David Sodergren’s The HAAR.
Summary
The small fishing town is being threatened with losing its natural beauty due to a corrupt billionaire, whose name is Mr. Grant, who wants to destroy large areas of the town and replace it with a golf course.
All looks bleak for the townspeople until our protagonist receives a severe beating from Mr. Grant’s son. Muriel, our protagonist who is an 80-year-old woman who has lived in the town her whole life, finds a strange goopy one-eyed creature along the shoreline that starts to telepathically talk to her within her mind.
The creature convinces her to bring him back to her home where he is kept in a bathtub while Muriel feeds him with her blood to keep him alive. As the story continues she decides to give the creature the name of Avalon which clearly references the location in the King Arthur stories.
Muriel also discovers later on in the narrative that her newfound friend can shapeshift into other people. In particular, her dead husband named Billy. This brings back all the lovely memories that Muriel had of her dead husband, making her develop feelings for Avalon. But for Avalon to continue living in the form of Billy he needs to consume lots of blood, an amount that would probably kill Muriel if she were to continue feeding him.
Throughout the story we are told of how the town used to stand up against Mr.Grant, slowly however, all the people who used to love their town are paid very generously to sell their land to Mr.Grant. This deal was so popular with the citizens that less than ten people remained in the town. These remaining ones are so unwilling to sell their land that Mr.Grant is compelled to send in a small group of hoodlums to kill a few of them which would by consequence scare the rest away.
During an assassination attempt, one of the killers is injured and breaks into Muriel’s house to try and find help or some medical supplies to help bandage himself up. While he is unable to find help he does find Avalon, who is quite hungry at this point and sees his next meal walking up to him. Avalon quickly and quite violently devours the killer.
Muriel, who wasn’t present for the killing because she saw and chased after the fire that the killers started at their previous victim’s house, comes back home to see the bloody mess left by the creature. When admiring the mess that was left she notices someone is sitting in Billy’s chair. She comes to learn that due to his abnormally large meal, Avalon was able to turn himself into Muriel’s deceased husband.
All this doesn’t last and Avalon soon turns back into his one-eyed goopy self, this leaves Muriel emotionally torn. Does she continue to feed Avalon with more meals, which are supplied by Mr.Grant’s men, just so she can keep pretending to have her Billy back? But, this would make her a murderer, she’d be no better than Mr.Grant, at what point does SHE become the villain? This is, from what I can tell, one of the larger themes of the story.
After being bullied and harassed by Mr.Grant for so long, she finally has a way to fight back, good ol’Avalon. In exchange for feeding him, Muriel will in exchange get to keep talking to ” Billy” and finally get closure from his death, it isn’t like she’s feeding him innocent people. She even tells Avalon that he can only kill the bad ones.
Eventually, an assistant of Mr.Grant visits Muriel to see if the hired killers did their job. To the assistant’s surprise, Muriel is still alive and well while carrying a suspicious sack around her torso which is carrying Avalon in his more gelatinous form. Seeing this, the assistant probes her to find out what is in the sack that Muriel is hiding, she then discovers the slimy mess that is Avalon and this disgusts her so much that she begins to leave.
Muriel realizes that she can use this assistant as a meal for poor helpless Avalon she begins to yell and chase her, even going so far as to tell her that she’ll take the money offer from Grant. This is all to no avail as the employee has already made up her mind that she’s leaving. Muriel becomes so desperate that she begins to pull on her, so much so that her trousers fall off and embarrasses the poor young lady. Having been thoroughly embarrassed in front of her security guard, she begins telling Muriel that Grant will be there soon and making all kinds of threats to scare her.
Later Mr.Grant does show up to finally meet Muriel face to face. He’s not alone however, he brings with him his security along with a white van that was there to take her to the psychiatric hospital. She realizes that Mr.Grant in a last-ditch effort to rid of the pain that was Muriel, he decides he’s going to have her committed to the looney bin while the local news media broadcast it to the world.
While Mr.Grant and his son are taunting her, Muriel starts trying to think of a way out or at least a way to get revenge on the evil billionaire. Realizing that Avalon is her only way out of this and remembering that she left him in the bathtub she manages to convince Mr.Grant and his entourage to allow her a minute to go relieve herself in the restroom in hopes of actually feeding Avalon. Our heroine succeeds but Mr.Grant makes the lady who visited her earlier to go to the restroom with her.
Having closed the door behind them and her back turned from Muriel, the young assistant accidentally falls into the tub and kills herself after Muriel tries to attack her. Avalon seeing his next meal doesn’t waste any time in devouring his lunch and we are given some rather graphic details on how he does so (it’s a horror book, it’s what we’re here for!).
Getting annoyed with how long Muriel and the young lady ( I think this is the first time we get her name in the book, it’s Shelly.) Mr.Grant starts yelling for them to hurry up out of the restroom while completely unaware of the gory mess that lies in the restroom. He eventually barges in through the door only to be in absolute horror.
Mr.Grant’s security sees the dead body in the bathtub and goes to examine it and once they do, they are attacked by Avalon where we again get some more grisly details of how the creature is feeding on the guards. Grant and his son make an attempt to leave the house to get to safety but in the heat of the moment, Grant’s son closes the door in his father’s face as he makes his exit from the house which pushes Grant down to the ground with a now very hurt face.
Grabbing one of Grant’s guard’s guns Muriel realizes that she now has a hostage, or a victim, that she can make him do whatever she wants. Avalon begins suggesting to Muriel that he could go out there and kill the whole crowd of people outside waiting to watch her get sent to the ward Muriel says that he can’t go around killing innocent people but he can, however, kill the “bad ones”.
After receiving a phone call from her son who lets her know that she has officially made it onto the news to hold Grant hostage the police start yelling in their speakers that she needs to give herself up.
Pointing the gun that she got from one of the guards she continues to hold it up to her hostage’s head while slowly walking out the front door with Avalon in a bag. While walking out the front door she notices her wheelbarrow and tells Grant to pick it up and wheel it over to the beach, while doing this she slings her bag containing Avalon into the wheelbarrow. When making their way to the beach the fog starts to roll in which blinds the crowd from being able to see the three making their way down the shore.
Some complaints by Grant are made but after some pushing and threatening from Muriel he continues carrying on with the wheelbarrow until they come upon a cave that has sentimental meaning to Muriel. When Grant goes into the cave the fog begins to clear up and with it, the crowd moves over to the entrance of the cave. Grant begins to realize that his only way out is to beg, and beg he does, offering millions, tens of millions of dollars in exchange for Muriel letting him live.
This is to no avail, as Muriel pulls the trigger on her gun and Grant’s corpse hits the floor of the cold damp cave.
Next, the story continues from the crowd waiting anxiously to see a naked Mr.Grant walking confidently outside the cave toward his son. Some of Grant’s people try giving him their coats to cover his nude body from the reporters, but this Grant didn’t seem all that receptive to their offers as he silently strutted towards his son. To the shock of everyone in the crowd, Grant completely massacres his son in front of everybody.
This obviously sends the police into action and try to arrest Mr.Grant as he begins to walk toward the ocean, but Grant’s security prevents them from being able to catch up with him. Walking deeper and deeper into the ocean Grant’s men could no longer follow him and he eventually is completely submerged in the water and is never to be seen again.
We go back to Muriel’s point of view and we discover that the naked Mr.Grant was actually Muriel using Avalon as a bodysuit while Avalon himself was disguised as Mr.Grant. The story then ends with them both living together in the deep blue sea.
Main Themes
- What makes someone evil?
- What can we lose when we focus on progress?
- One can be so consumed by their desires (for example Muriel grieving her husband and Mr.Grant willing to have townspeople murdered for money.) that they can be consumed by evil.
- Respect the past and those that represent the past, or you might just get killed by it.
Fun Facts
Muriel, the main character of the book, is actually based on the author’s grandmother. So much so that at the end of the book he left her memoirs in the back of the book. I personally found this incredibly wholesome and was much needed after the utter brutal mess that Avalon left behind.
Final Thoughts
After reading this book I found it to be a very easy and enjoyable read. I’d recommend it to anyone who wants something short enough that they could read it in the afternoon. While I wouldn’t call it necessarily a scary book that will be keeping you up at night, it does have many good suspenseful moments.
The two strongest things this book has going for it I’d say are Muriel’s relationship with Avalon and David Sodergren’s ability to describe the grotesque violence in every bloody detail. If that at all interests you then I’d highly suggest reading it and you can buy it on Amazon by clicking here.
Thank you for taking the time to read this, I am deeply honored to have YOU as a reader.