The Brooklyn Rail

In this eco-horror thriller, a young woman, Erin Harper, travels to the rural Oregon town of Faraday, ostensibly on assignment to do a travel story. But she soon meets up with a group of her friends and some locals to explore the woods and investigate one in a long line of missing person cases. Erin is a twenty-something who wants to be a serious journalist, and her closest friend Hari is doing a podcast focused on missing BIPOC women. Two hot locals are lifelong friends, and provide a sort of rural attraction for the tourists in the group, as well as being helpful guides through the forest and the dark history of Faraday. There are others in the group as well, but the depth of characterization wasn’t enough for me to keep them apart. In contrast, the setting of the deep Pacific Northwest forest in the foothills of Mount Hood, Oregon, is depicted skillfully and becomes perhaps the most memorable character in the novel.

In a far too common trope, the novel starts with a nameless, naked body of a young woman who has been left to die. A coyote drags her body into a nearby creek where she is soon inhabited by a strange force. Later we learn that this young woman has a name: Elena Lopez. She was a waitress at the local brewery and has been reported missing. As she floats in the creek, her body becomes possessed by a strange force and, in a state neither dead nor alive, she begins to wreak vengeance on those who harmed her. While this was perhaps the most compelling plot line in the novel, she has very few scenes and (spoiler) comes to a terrible second ending. This read to me as both casual tokenism and a failed opportunity in the midst of a fairly pedestrian novel.

Faraday, Oregon is a town with a history of logging, mining, and other climate abuse. The aging town matriarch, Olivia Vanderpoel, who owns the B&B where Erin is staying, is descended from the town’s wealthiest family who made their money in the industries whose remains are polluting the forest. Olivia is still grieving her son, Scott, who disappeared into the woods a decade earlier. We learn that Erin is also grieving—her only brother Bryan disappeared into these same woods some five years before. Both women are convinced their loved ones are still alive, and this becomes a touchstone between them. Their shared grief gestures toward a deeper emotional current in the novel, but the forward drive of the action overtakes this more delicate plot line.

While the pace is a bit bumpy, the horror ramps up quickly with the group of friends going on a nighttime adventure out into the woods. Here they stumble around in the dark using only unreliable headlamps and discover the ruins of the Vanderpoel’s old hotel strangely covered in fungus, hiding the horrific remains of animals. Described in detail, the animal parts point toward a local family of poachers and generally violent men, one of whom is known to harass women, setting him up as a potential suspect. This plotline also fades without resolution, but as the story spins out, the woods themselves take on the role of a malevolent character—it’s clear that nature is not to be trusted, and the fungus growing abundantly is definitely dangerous. Revealing too much too soon, one of the missing men, Scott, appears in interwoven scenes, struggling either for or against a bioluminescent supernatural force, “the Strangeness,” which has also re-animated the body of “the girl in the creek.”

The competing themes of a local nice guy who is actually a sexual predator/serial killer, violent local poachers who may or may not be serial killers, and an alien force that is attempting to create new forms of life out in the forest make for a muddy plot at times. And although there are some gestures toward vengeance for Elena, “the girl in the creek,” ultimately, she’s never given her own voice. With a twist ending that is a very large nod to Jeff VanderMeer, there is little here that’s original. All the same, this novel makes for an entertaining, fast-paced read for those who like their horror body-centered, with a good dose of climate revenge and fungus.