Source: personal purchase. This is a review of my reading experience.
A History of Wild Places is a horror-adjacent mystery novel by Shea Ernshaw.
Travis Wren has an unusual talent for locating missing people. Hired by families as a last resort, he requires only a single object to find the person who has vanished. When he takes on the case of Maggie St. James—a well-known author of dark, macabre children’s books—he’s led to a place many believed to be only a legend.
Called "Pastoral," this reclusive community was founded in the 1970s by like-minded people searching for a simpler way of life. By all accounts, the commune shouldn’t exist anymore and soon after Travis stumbles upon it… he disappears. Just like Maggie St. James.
Years later, Theo, a lifelong member of Pastoral, discovers Travis’s abandoned truck beyond the border of the community. No one is allowed in or out, not when there’s a risk of bringing a disease—rot—into Pastoral. Unraveling the mystery of what happened reveals secrets that Theo, his wife, Calla, and her sister, Bee, keep from one another. Secrets that prove their perfect, isolated world isn’t as safe as they believed—and that darkness takes many forms.
Hauntingly beautiful, hypnotic, and bewitching, A History of Wild Places is a story about fairy tales, our fear of the dark, and losing yourself within the wilderness of your mind.
I've never read any of Shea Ernshaw's YA books, but I was really
excited to check out her adult debut. It sounded very twisty and unique,
and I was ready to take what I thought would be a pretty trippy ride.
In
the end, I did wind up liking A History of Wild Places, but it was a
struggle to get there. The book is broken up into four parts. The first
part follows Travis - a private investigator of sorts - starting out on
his journey to find a missing woman. These 50 pages are all told through
Travis' first person perspective. It took me a while to get use to a
literary first person adult narrative, but by the end of those 50 pages I
was hooked and ready.
This is where my first big issue came in. Part two switches everything. Suddenly
the reader is following three different characters (all still in first
person narrative) who are living with this strange cult in the woods. I
had to reorient myself all over again. I spent most of A History of Wild
Places trying to decide whether to DNF or not.
This
book obviously worked a lot better for other reviewers than it did for
me. Even though I struggled pretty hard with it, the concept is unique
enough that I recommend you try it out for yourself if you've been
interested in reading it.
2.5/5 stars
