the wild hunt

I had a heck of a week last week. A list of things that happened: the first four days of the school year, a traffic ticket & car trouble, a stolen wallet, a lunch left in a ride share car, a trip to Iowa, and a general feeling of possibly being cursed? So in the midst of it all I obviously bought a book I had barely heard of before in an airport bookstore and read it in the space of the weekend. Emma Seckel’s The Wild Hunt is a haunting and harrowing historical adult fantasy, and it was an excellent escape from the world.  

The islanders have only three rules: don’t stick your nose where it’s not wanted, don’t mention the war, and never let your guard down during October.

Leigh Welles has not set foot on the island in years, but when she finds herself called home from a disappointing life on the Scottish mainland by her father’s unexpected death, she is determined to forget the sorrows of the past—her mother’s abandonment, her brother’s icy distance, the unspeakable tragedy of World War II—and start fresh. Fellow islander Iain MacTavish, a RAF veteran with his eyes on the sky and his head in the past is also in desperate need of a new beginning. A young widower, Iain struggles to return to the normal life he knew before the war.

But this October is anything but normal. This October, the sluagh are restless. The ominous, bird-like creatures of Celtic legend—whispered to carry the souls of the dead—have haunted the islanders for decades, but in the war’s wake, there are more wandering souls and more slaugh. When a local boy disappears, Leigh and Iain are thrown together to investigate the truth at the island’s dark heart and reveal hidden secrets of their own.

Rich with historical detail and a skillful speculative edge, Emma Seckel’s propulsive and pulse-pounding debut The Wild Hunt unwinds long-held tales of love, loss, and redemption.

 

Leigh Welles is accustomed to loss—her mother disappeared into the sea when she was ten and never came back, her brother left for university soon afterward and then disappeared into the Second World War and never sailed back home, she lost her own big city dreams in the slog of trying to make it on the post-war mainland, and now she’s finally returned because her father fell and drowned, and there’s a funeral to attend and a discarded life to shake the dust off of and return to. Put all that together with the fact that on their remote Scottish island, something uncanny happens in October, and you have the setting for The Wild Hunt. How the next month plays out—the unrest and cruelty of the sluagh (spirits who take the form of crows and only appear in October) will either make or break the island, and Leigh and those she loves will be closest to it all.

This book does a lot: it is a post-war imagining, both pastoral and historical. It is also speculative and literary, and dips into horror in places as well. It succeeds as a narrative because of the pervasive atmosphere Seckel creates within its covers. There’s an overarching heaviness and darkness in Seckel’s tale, a countdown sounding in ominous bass notes in the background, the unbearable weight of history and at the same time tradition and superstition knocking up against the modern world. There’s a sense of isolation that butts up against belonging, and cloying despair battling it out with small moments of hope. I found it fascinating, but I like a slow build and excessive world building. The gathering unrest of it all—contained, quiet, and devastating, did not feel fully resolved, but it did feel fitting. If you like stories that slowly sink their claws into your psyche and leave small openings for what may come next, you’ll like this book.

As mentioned above, loss colors much of the narrative, and no one’s loss seems more personal or immediate than Leigh’s…until you meet the wreck that is Iain MacTavish, slowly sinking in a sea of guilt over death — those island boys lost in the war, a wife lost in the Blitz, and survivors carried away in senseless post-war slaughter, both memory- and sluagh-caused. Seckel skillfully interweaves Leigh and Iain’s voices, dreams, pieces of the past (long-gone and near), and other villagers’ perspectives to create a poignant whole. The characterization rests against a foggy and indistinct background, on some small Scottish isle — never positively identified by name but described in eerie detail. Aside from loss, the most immediate themes are the futility of war, legend and myth crossing over into reality, and community identity. The fact that this story is not easily categorized, but still succeeds, is a credit to Seckel’s writing ability: neither spare nor overblown, and careful in its urgency and construction.

In all, The Wild Hunt is convincing and emotion-laden. It’s a trip straight into the past, into the liminal spaces between worlds, and to an island held in the malevolent spell of mysterious creatures and too-present grief.

Recommended for: fantasy fans who enjoy a dark fantasy/horror vibe, readers who think mythology-meets-post-war-despair sounds intriguing, those who enjoy bird-based horror and myth, and anyone (quite rightly!) obsessed with Scottish coastline, expertly and lovingly described. 

how high we go in the dark

I ordered a copy of Sequoia Nagamatsu’s debut How High We Go in the Dark for multiple reasons. It had an interesting title, and striking book cover, the author’s name was (is) cool, and I saw a glowing review of it somewhere (can’t remember where at this point!). So this book made its way into my possession, and was one of the 42 titles I packed to bring with me to the lake for the summer. I do understand that I sound like both a caricature of a book lover and/or someone in a novel when I phrase things that way, lol. Still, I didn’t know too much about How High: climate plague, prescient, and literary fiction were about the sum of it. I finished the book this past Friday evening, just as we learned that most of the house had Covid-19, so my thoughts and reactions were a weird mix of appreciation for a lovely, strange, atmospheric, and gentle book, and comparison to our very real pandemic.

 

Beginning in 2030, a grieving archeologist arrives in the Arctic Circle to continue the work of his recently deceased daughter at the Batagaika crater, where researchers are studying long-buried secrets now revealed in melting permafrost, including the perfectly preserved remains of a girl who appears to have died of an ancient virus.

Once unleashed, the Arctic Plague will reshape life on earth for generations to come, quickly traversing the globe, forcing humanity to devise a myriad of moving and inventive ways to embrace possibility in the face of tragedy. In a theme park designed for terminally ill children, a cynical employee falls in love with a mother desperate to hold on to her infected son. A heartbroken scientist searching for a cure finds a second chance at fatherhood when one of his test subjects—a pig—develops the capacity for human speech. A widowed painter and her teenaged granddaughter embark on a cosmic quest to locate a new home planet.

From funerary skyscrapers to hotels for the dead to interstellar starships, Sequoia Nagamatsu takes readers on a wildly original and compassionate journey, spanning continents, centuries, and even celestial bodies to tell a story about the resiliency of the human spirit, our infinite capacity to dream, and the connective threads that tie us all together in the universe.

In loosely connected vignettes, characters from both the near and far future react to a devastating Arctic Plague unleashed by global warming and melting permafrost. Devoted families try anything to save their families, disaffected loners work in a transformed funerary industry, doctors and scientists grapple with not only how to cure the plague, but how to escape and/or fix earth, and everyone deals in some way with grief, beliefs and responsibilities around death, and a planet transformed by mass trauma. Nagamatsu’s work imagines a world responding to a modern pandemic, and in doing so reveals an empathetic view of the future.

 

The elephant in the room is that there currently IS a global pandemic, and it has gone rather differently than Nagamatsu’s imagining – although he couldn’t have possibly known that, as he wrote his book pre-pandemic. It wouldn’t do you (or me!) any good to list all of the ways that things have gone differently in real life, so I will say only that Nagamatsu’s work is rather more generous to humanity. It imagines elaborate memorials, burial pacts, donating bodies to science, death hotels, parents taking their children to euthanasia theme parks for one last good day – at the core, remembrance and celebration of those lost to the plague. In doing so, Nagamatsu expresses a fundamental optimism (yes, in the midst of all of that death). Even as How High describes death in minute detail, the focus is on human beings striving for connection. Nagamatsu’s deft touch never feels emotionally manipulative, but – against all odds – tender and authentic.

 

Plague-fueled dystopias are not a new subgenre of science fiction, but I did appreciate architecture of this book, its literary fiction feel, and largely Japanese and Japanese-American characters as unique entry points. I also immediately liked the prose – not spare, by any means, but never overwrought. While each successive chapter is linked in some way to the others, there is no central (or even repeated) narrator, so it is not until you reach the end that everything unites into a cohesive whole. In that way the book feels more like a short story collection than a novel. At a couple of days’ remove, I can also point to Nagamatsu’s variations on intimacy (not sex) as a highlight. In other words, this book makes you think about what makes a loved one loved, and how people enter your life at different times, in different places, and mean different things depending on those times and places. It is a thoughtful work that makes the reader ponder human nature, our place in the world, and even our place in the cosmos.

 

In all, How High We Go in the Dark is an inventive, haunting, and extremely human story – one of striving to be our better selves/present/something in the midst of tragedy. It speaks to our current moment, of course, but it is also a meditation on loss, grief, and what is beyond all of this.

 

Recommended for: fans of Jodi Lyn Anderson’s Midnight at the Electric and Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven, literary fiction and atmospheric, soft science fiction aficionados, and anyone intrigued by the premise of a pandemic novel written just before our very own pandemic.