BooksHorror

The Wilding by Ian McDonald (book review).

‘The Wilding’ is a departure for British writer Ian McDonald. While the majority of his novels are science fiction, this latest offering is very firmly a contemporary horror story. I reviewed his BSFA award-winning novel ‘The Dervish House’ here in 2010 and enjoyed it a tremendous deal, so I was intrigued to find out what a horror novel by him would be like.

A rewilding project in County Galway, in the Republic of Ireland, serves as the setting for the story. For the next two days, Lisa Donnan, a countryside ranger, teams up with a colleague named Nathan to lead a group of five twelve-year-old schoolchildren and their three teachers on an overnight field trip in Lough Carrow. Despite her love for working in nature, Lisa is not particularly fond of children. Particularly this group, most of whom either don’t want to be there, aren’t properly dressed for hiking, or have physical or emotional problems of their own to deal with.

Before the field trip even begins, John O’Dowd, a nearby farmer, reports that a ferocious animal has brutally slaughtered one of his cows, mildly spooking Lisa. O’Dowd is a serial complainer, though, with a years-old grudge against the entire rewilding project, so she assumes he’s made it up.

Once they head into Lough Carrow, it doesn’t take long for things to start going wrong. The girl, wearing inappropriate shoes, sustains massive blisters. They find a dog that had been reported missing; only it’s dead and has been horribly mutilated. Despite Lisa knowing the area extremely well, they find themselves off-track and behind schedule. Then, while they’re planning their next steps, something huge but indescribable explodes out of the willow trees and drags Lisa’s fellow ranger Nathan off the path and into the wilderness beyond. He doesn’t even have time to scream.

After that, the only question is whether Lisa can keep the school parties safe from whatever’s out there while she tries to navigate them back to civilization.

‘The Wilding’ is an impressive novel. From the very first page, McDonald describes each of his settings with evocative, lyrical prose, which not only places you deep in the wild Irish countryside but makes you long to be there for real. The descriptive passages generate such beauty and stillness that the sudden moments of visceral horror, when they come, are incredibly shocking. It almost feels like someone has cut the most shocking scenes from The Blair Witch Project’ into a David Attenborough nature documentary.

In Lisa Donnan, McDonald has given us a fantastically complex protagonist. She knows her job and the local area extremely well, even though we soon find out that she is not there by choice. She had a difficult childhood and ended up making some poor decisions as a young woman. Becoming a Ranger has enabled her to break with the past and start to forge a new future. When things start to go south, though, the toughness and quick thinking she developed in her teens turn out to be very handy indeed.

The rest of the cast are an impressively diverse bunch. McDonald gives each member of the school party a strong individual identity. I found several of them, both pupils and teachers, to be quite annoying to begin with. But as I got to know them and their backstories, I warmed to almost all of them. None came across as flat, secondary characters, and so, unlike in low budget B-movies, I found myself worrying about the fate of every single one of them.

McDonald has explored the intriguing basic plot idea of the rewilding project going feral, particularly during the COVID pandemic when the area was unmanaged, with great originality. I don’t want to give away any huge plot spoilers, so I’ll just say that I will think twice in the future before wandering off into any ancient forests or exploring a rewilded peat bog.

Ian McDonald is an acknowledged past master at writing science fiction. With ‘The Wilding’, he can confidently assert his status as a successful horror novelist. too.  Warmly recommended.

Patrick Mahon

October 2024

(pub: Gollancz, 2024. 310 page hardback. Price: £25.00 (UK). ISBN: 978-1-3996-1147-3)

check out websites: www.orionbooks.co.uk and www.gollancz.com

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