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The Festival
Two friends win tickets to Solstice, a midsummer festival pitched deep in the Welsh hills, and find the heat, the crowd, and the too-smooth organisers all feel subtly off. Louise Mumford's folk-horror-tinged thriller turns a getaway sour by degrees, until the real problem isn't getting in. It's getting back out.
The Review
Our take
Libby wins tickets to Solstice, a midsummer music festival pitched deep in rural Wales, and talks her friend Dawn into coming along. It's supposed to be an escape. Both women have something they're running from, and a few days of music in the hills sounds like the cure. Mumford doesn't rush the dread. She lets it gather. The heat sits too heavy. The festival's branding carries an edge that never quite resolves into irony, and the organisers are a shade too polished. By the time the crowd tips into something genuinely unhinged, you've been trained to hear menace under every cheerful announcement over the PA.
What gives the book its particular charge is how Mumford uses the solstice itself. The Welsh countryside isn't scenery here. It hems the festival in: boggy ground past the perimeter, hills that swallow sound, a landscape indifferent to whatever got pitched on top of it. And because it's the longest day, the dark keeps refusing to come. That one detail does real work. The chaos of the second half plays out in unbroken sunshine, which lends it a feverish, overexposed quality the story needs. This stays in thriller country rather than the supernatural, but it borrows the folk-horror feeling that a place runs by its own rules and tolerates outsiders only up to a point.
The pacing matches the premise. Slow-burn at first, then steadily more claustrophobic, then a final stretch that accelerates hard. Dawn's disappearance is the hinge, and Mumford handles it with care. She builds in the ordinary friction of the situation, the social awkwardness of one woman trying to get a chaotic event to take her seriously, so Libby's slow response reads as recognisable rather than convenient. The festival's backstory arrives in pieces instead of one front-loaded dump, which keeps the mystery moving.
Libby is worth following precisely because she has no useful skills to fall back on. She isn't an investigator. She's a woman running on anxiety and loyalty, and that makes her choices feel real even when they're bad ones. Her friendship with Dawn is the emotional core, and it's lived-in rather than functional. There's history between them, some old friction, and the pressure of the place keeps dragging it to the surface in ways that ring true.
Why you should read
- Readers drawn to festival or event-based suspense where the setting itself becomes the trap
- Fans of folk-horror-inflected thrillers with the claustrophobic community dread of Andrew Taylor's The Burning Girls, though Mumford's tone is more contemporary and grounded
- Anyone who enjoys female friendship at the centre of a thriller's emotional stakes
- Fans of sun-and-dread suspense where a holiday or getaway premise curdles gradually rather than all at once
What to expect
- Readers who prefer strict psychological realism throughout may feel the final act shifts into more heightened, operatic territory than the measured opening suggests
- The narrative stays close to Libby's single perspective, so secondary characters remain largely impressionistic, which suits the atmosphere but limits the ensemble feel
Two things to know before you go in. If you like your psychological thrillers strictly realistic, the final act may push further than those measured opening chapters seem to promise; the escalation turns operatic, and whether it lands will depend on how invested in Libby you already are. And this is Libby's story top to bottom. Everyone else reaches you through her, which suits the claustrophobia but keeps the secondary cast at arm's length. If you want a crowded ensemble, that's the trade.
Reviewed by Quinn · Updated June 26, 2026
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