The Winter People

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death by suicide, pregnancy loss, child death, and violence.

“It then became my task, over the next year, to organize the entries and shape them into a book. I embraced the opportunity, as I soon realized that the story these pages tell could change everything we think we understand about life and death.”

The Winter People uses, in part, a framing device or a frame narrative to tell a story within the story. This framing device is the journal entries of Sara Harrison Shea collected into Visitors from the Other Side and published by her niece, Amelia. This gives the narrative a degree of verisimilitude and adds realism to the supernatural elements within. The use of a framing device is common in Gothic horror and ghost stories like those of M. R. James. In this quote, the text, through the words of Amelia, lays out the stakes of the novel, emphasizing it could “change everything we think we understand about life and death.”

“I had heard whispers, rumors of sleepers called back from the land of the dead by grieving husbands and wives, but was certain they only existed in the stories old women liked to tell each other while they folded laundry or stitched stockings—something to pass the time, and to make any eavesdropping children hurry home before dark.

I had been sure, up until then, that God in his infinite wisdom would not have allowed such an abomination.”

This quote from Sara’s journal establishes the theme of The Intersection of Folklore and Reality. Sara notes that she had heard “rumors” of sleepers as a child, but she had dismissed them as an old wives’ tale. This parallels Ruthie’s dismissal of local folklore as a child. They are both forced to reckon with these understandings when they come into contact with sleepers. Sara describes the sleeper she sees as an “abomination,” because it defies known natural laws of life and death.