Pages: 351
Published: 7th December 2021
Genre: Paranormal Mystery
Content warnings: Missing person storyline, sexual references
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. Unravelling 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.
This is a slow burn of a story that presents you with an intriguing premise and fizzes with underlying menace. Deeply descriptive and atmospheric in the extreme, it is driven by three powerful character perspectives that are equally unusual and absorbing throughout a plot that at times might be a tad predictable, but rarely ceases to hold your attention.
The mystery and its paranormal elements are executed with real subtlety and contain various layers, that peel away gradually as the full picture emerges. Although it never brings you to the edge of your seat, there is a different kind of enjoyment to be found here, with strong storytelling and a regular supply of suspense to go with the arresting ideas that the author brings to the party.
Travis Wren is an unwilling detective with a innate talent for locating missing persons, possessing the unique ability to sense their movements through objects and the world around them. His latest case is that of the children’s author Maggie St. James, and his investigation takes him to a secretive rural community known as Pastoral. When he enters in search of Maggie, he soon vanishes too.
The members of Pastoral prefer a simple, secluded way of life and are discouraged from straying into the outside world, for fear of contracting a deadly disease. Theo has lived there for as long as he can remember, but one day his curiosity gets the better of him and he crosses the boundary to find Travis’ abandoned car on the roadside, complete with documents about Maggie.
When he returns, seemingly immune from disease, Theo shares his discovery with his wife Calla. It forces them to confront the secrets they are hiding from one another as they learn that Travis and Maggie did indeed make it to Pastoral, but not a trace of them remains. Meanwhile, Calla’s sister Bee is in a relationship with the group’s leader Levi, whose increasingly erratic behaviour creates divisions across the commune.
The opening part focuses on Travis and his search for Maggie, immediately impressing on the reader that this is a mystery with a unique twist. After this introduction, it was a little surprising to find that the entire rest of the story takes place in Pastoral and focuses on the members of its community, although the reason for that gradually becomes more evident.
It is admittedly rather slow going, but the various components of the mystery along with the curious ways of life adopted by the commune make it immersive nonetheless. The clues begin to piece together and it reaches the point where the big twist becomes quite inevitable, with the most powerful moments arriving when the characters learn each others’ secrets.
After Travis disappears early on upon reaching Pastoral, almost the entire rest of the book is told in the first person from the three alternate perspectives of Theo, Calla, and Bee. While they were all interesting characters in their own way, they were written with a certain ambiguity that made it hard to fully connect with any of them, and sometimes their voices were too similar to each other.
Of the three, Calla is arguably the most compelling as she wrestles with the dilemma of searching for more clues while being wary of the things Theo is keeping from her and the fate that awaits him if Levi finds out he has been crossing the boundary. Bee is good example of blind representation and she has her own psychic abilities, while having quite a passionate, headstrong personality.
In between some of the chapters, there are brief excerpts from the first in Maggie’s series of novels, which seem very innocent but have somewhat sinister undertones. It was fun to scrutinise these little sections and try and read between the lines to find any hidden meanings, and they go on to play an important part in the plot.
As leader of the community, Levi feels like a suspicious character right from the start and so it proves, but he is also given a lot of complexity. He is extremely manipulative and this gets more pronounced as the story goes on, with displays of erratic, self-serving behaviour that renders him pretty dark and willing to stop at nothing to maintain his control of everyone’s lives at Pastoral.
The writing is infused with descriptions of the landscape and captures every little detail through the eyes of the main characters. This encapsulates the sheltered lives of those residing at Pastoral to terrific effect and creates a feeling of claustrophobia, especially when reading from Bee’s point of view. It is literally all they know, and the promise that a lethal disease apparently awaits them if they leave gives their existence an extra edginess.
As for the ending, the way it was resolved was not necessarily bad, but it was a bit underwhelming and most certainly rushed – quite a change of pace. The mystery and the life-defining decisions made by certain characters in the final act could have been explained in more depth, and as a result it feels that the story was slightly incomplete.
Overall, it is a richly imagined book that teems with atmosphere and consumes you in a bittersweet setting which poses a number of moral questions along the way. The plotting is thoughtful and well structured even if major revelations are at a premium, and there are brilliant concepts everywhere. The execution does falter at times, but it is a largely compelling read.
Shea Ernshaw has becoming well known for writing atmospheric novels and apparently she writes long into the night. Perhaps that is where she gets her inspiration. She has won acclaim for three young adult novels, entitled Winterwood, The Wicked Deep, and A Wilderness Of Stars.
A winner of the Oregon Book Award, in 2021 Ernshaw published A History Of Wild Places, which is her first adult novel. Getting a copy in the UK was rather tough going – it was not even available on Kindle!
A book that intrigued me a lot, and I was really into the setting and the atmosphere the author created. It was just lacking that extra something to make it special, and I did not connect with the characters as much as I expected to.
My rating: ⭐⭐⭐.5
Stephen Reads Books 