Every weekend people love to take a trip from their comfortable homes, heating and enter the countryside? Its beautiful but its also quite different to what city life offers. This was a land a few generations that we were more in balance and on occasion beaten back by in terms of lack of food and we were not always the most dangerous animals around. When fantasy and horror evoke images of dark woods, dangerous moors and crafty rivers I always think authors are reminding us to be wary. In Ian McDonald’s superb horror novel The Wilding we have a tale that explores if our new found love for environment protection has fully removed that fear and danger and it is an exhilarating gorgeous nightmare of a tale that is going to unfold.

Lough Carrow in Ireland is the scene of nature healing. The peat bogs of Ireland have been around thousands of years and severely impacted by industrialisation with bogs destroyed and wider environmental pollution decimating local wildlife. But rewilding has made inroads and a huge, protected space is being nurtured back to full health even with species such as beavers, ponies and deer making a comeback. Those out of towners who are fascinated by nature love it. Other locals se it as a pain I the neck that endangers their livelihoods. But at the visitor centre Lisa who is ready to start university at Dublin and fully move into the new life she craves has the dreaded activity of managing a wildlife sleep over with some teachers and not entirely pleased teenagers. If that is not bad enough pets are missing and there seem to be several mutilated animals being found. Lisa and her little group are about to find the wilderness is not yet tamed.

Horror is often about a flip. Normality turning into a frightening and different world we don’t understand or belong to. Its driving on normal sunny day when someone crashes into you or opening your front door to find it being burgled…and in The Wilderness Ian McDonald does this beautifully. The setting and characters are grounded, there are subtle signs of something wrong and then BAM everyone is in extreme danger. It very quickly shows the magnitude and extent of the danger, and we then spend the rest of the book trying to escape it.

I’m not going to tell you what the threat is as that’s a key part of the mystery. What I can though enormously appreciate is just how well told a story this is. In the first part McDonald fully grounds the world as ours but with mischievous nods towards fantasy creeping in. Ina few chapters we get images of life at the centre a well-run unit of workers who get on, all run on weird nicknames for everything thanks to their magnificent boss Padraig and its filled with banter, groans and mumbles that quickly brings the characters and world to life. All the quirky dynamics from the exercise obsessed to the ones trying to rehome puppies and yet there are nods to something more. Padraig loves to confuse tourists by nailing fairy doors to trees, the Visitor Centre is called the Tower of Power and when Lisa and her group walk into the wilderness even hobbits are mentioned. Throw in the history of a place known for bog bodies and a nearby group of middle-class tourists/incomers fascinated with ancient customs and a whole array of suspects as to what may be going on are laid out but importantly it feels incredibly real.

McDonald has also pulled this with characters who may feel familiar and yet are never stereotypes. Its always lovely to read teenagers done well and Lisa’s group is filled with them. The joker mimic Ryan, the kind but fragile Erin, the really obviously keen to get out of walking but level headed Saorise and the more unusual sullen Artem and the neurodiverse character Firaz who says what he thinks could very easily just be cannon fodder or used to say how bad the youth are but McDonald shows them at their lows and strengths, puts them in danger and also unpeels the backstory. We are firmly on their side throughout. Eve the teachers and co-workers are not two dimensional and all put their wards first but for me the standout is Lisa. A woman we find who loves to drive fast, carries a book of Yeats poetry around and is haunted by her past and battling her desire to lash out and to do the right thing. She becomes the group’s leader, and that responsibility is heavy and extremely stressful. I loved finding out the complexities within her and seeing what she is capable of and again a character you root for throughout.

Yes, gentle reader, I’m still skirting about how wrong things are going to get for people but lets just say its bloody, creepy, disturbing and unsettling horror. Bogs and woods when you’ve no phone signal become something really dangerous and throw in what is after this group and that becomes terrifying. When bad things happen, they are indiscriminate, and a variety of threats have to be navigated and the odds are against them. The vulnerability of an inner-city group of school kids and teachers makes this feel a very unbalanced battle for survival and that keeps the tension running all through to the final pages. McDonald uses the set up well to make us care and then the pace rattles along all the way to keep us on our toes with occasional stops for a breather or to throw something awful and breathtaking at our lost kids.

The other standout in this is McDonald’s narration. I love books where the author even in third person makes the narrator almost a character in their own right. McDonald can be mischievous in descriptions, sarcastic, informative about everything from Ireland’s economic troubles to explaining the natural world and all of that comes alive with language. This is a story that knows when to have a twinkle in its eye and then can jump seamlessly into the dark poetry of horror including the bloody and the atmospheric to create something utterly compelling. Those earlier nods to the fantastical pay off as this lost group of wanderers are in many ways now in a very different world filled with dangers and the final acts are filled with dark, wondrous and epic moments to conclude the battle to survive. The writing really gives this story its pulse and heartbeat that carries you along in its wake.

The Wilding is an excellent slice of modern horror. The unusual setting combined with characters who feel wonderfully humans all work well when the proverbial hits the fan and after that moment we are in an extremely well told roller-coaster of a ride. Perfect for a winter night’s reading but perhaps not what you want on your next camping holiday! It is strongly recommended!

3.5 of 5 stars rounded to 4
https://lynns-books.com/2024/10/18/review-the-wilding-by-ian-mcdonald/
My Five Word TL:DR Review: A Little Slow to Start

I enjoyed The Wilding. The writing is really good, very evocative and the author sets the scene very well. Yes, it was a little slow to start as we get to know the characters. To be honest, on the one hand, I’m not totally sure that all the character building was totally necessary as some of these characters are about to meet a grisly end, but, on the other hand, if the author just skimmed over these characters and gave them no depth it would be immediately obvious that their roles were going to be short lived, so, for me, it’s worth taking the time to get to know these people as it definitely makes their sudden demise much more shocking.

The premise of the story is a group of rangers and young adults, going into the wild to spend a night, at one with nature. It’s an unlikely group of characters in some respects. Lisa, the MC, is longing for a new start in life at University and in fact this little wilderness trek is probably going to be her last mission. The other young adults don’t particularly come across as enthusiastic (at least not all of them) about this little jaunt into the wild and have an almost bored, are we really doing this, attitude, but they’re going to get a sudden jolt of nasty reality in fairly short order.

The author sets the scene early. There have been unexplained attacks on farm animals and other unexplained incidences. The setting feeds into the atmosphere perfectly. This is a rewilding project based deep in rural island where the locals, the project itself and nature are struggling to come to a balance and, well, ultimately failing it would seem. There’s a lovely build up of tension, I would say that at one point I was on the brink of wondering when the action would kick in but then suddenly I was in the middle of chaos. When the proverbial hits the fan things go batpoop crazy. The wilderness seems to take on a mind of its own causing confusion and driving the party deeper into the bog. There’s bad weather, marshy boglands, bugs and that awful feeling of being watched coupled with the hysteria and panic created when people are desperately trying to survive. And there are some really unusual settings where our little group find shelter.

I don’t really want to say too much more for fear of spoiling the read for others. I enjoyed this, it had a slightly slow start but I think that initial build up makes the story more dramatic. There is definite horror and blood and guts. I don’t know whether I’d call this a folk story. It’s more like nature as a whole – showing us it’s power coupled with the journey of one character in particular – Lisa – who starts the story longing to move on before going on something of a self discovery jaunt herself, becoming very protective of the young people in her charge and throwing caution to the wind as she tries to keep them alive.

I received a copy through Netgalley, courtesy of the publisher, for which my thanks. The above is my own opinion.

My rating 3.5 of 5 stars rounded to 4 for the strange and dark appeal

The Wilding is a horror novel written by Ian McDonald, and published by Gollancz. A slow burn story that blends together elements from folk horror with a more modern terror, including a group of well-fleshed characters that are put in an extreme situation, becoming the prey of an ancient force.

Lough Carrow is a rewilding project in the depths of rural Ireland; Lisa, a Ranger that is longing to abandon this place, is taking a group of five kids and their three teachers for a sleepover night. However, after they are attacked by an unknown creature, they are forced to run deeper into the bog; progressively running into stranger manifestations, realising that the project has brought back something really ancient that is now hunting them.

In a first third of the novel, McDonald does an excellent job building the characters and preparing the atmosphere for the chaos that will be unleashed after; as a consequence, the initial part can be a bit rough in terms of pacing, but the payoff makes it worth-it. Lisa is a broken character after a traumatic event, that is alone in the world, and that however, will have to take the responsibility on this situation; a weight over her shoulders that, at many points, will logically take her to the border of collapse (I saw this novel comped with Midsommar, and I could see a bit of Danny in the character of Lisa). While the group that accompanies her is a bit secondary, I still enjoyed that, especially in the case of the children, they are fully developed, they are not just caricatures put there to die.

The atmosphere is excellently built, creating that oppressive and wild nature sensation that, when you are not in control, instils that fear of the unknown; McDonald weaves it together with folk elements to create an insuperable combination. As previously said, the pace is a bit of slow burn at the start, but once we overcome the first third, the story flows.

The Wilding is a great novel, especially if you want a modern take over folk horror; an excellent atmospherical proposal which I absolutely loved. I'm curious to see what brings McDonald in next novels!

Ian McDonald has been busy quietly becoming one of our best writers over the past couple of decades, and while a departure into horror isn’t likely to suddenly win him fawning accolades from the broadsheets, I’m happy to report that his prose is as good as ever here. There’s a little aside early on to tell you that isn’t folk horror - but it’s not exactly not folk horror either, with its parade of ancient forces rising out of the landscape (and what a landscape - the descriptions of the bog and the surrounding terrain are transportingly vivid). It doesn’t have the stately pace and low key weirdness of a lot of popular recent FH though - once everything kicks in here it goes like a train all the way to a climatic battle that is begging to be filmed. A lot of fun. Also worth noting that this is the second novel with a gerund for a title that I’ve read in the last few months. Horror’s back, baby!

Haunting and ethereal, this is a a fanastic spooky read. Ian McDonald has created a brilliant addition to the genre.

DNF. I really loved the premise of this one but unfortunately there was just something about the writing style that I wasn't personally gelling with

Lough Carrow is a rewilding project on the site of a peat bog in the depths of rural Ireland. Lisa, a ranger, is taking a group of school kids for an overnight stay in the wild, but after a sudden attack, they are forced off course, driven deeper into the bog. There, they see increasingly strange and threatening manifestations, and realise that something very ancient is on their tail. I loved Ian McDonald's The Wilding's mix of Irish folk horror plus the more modern terror of the search and rescue officer's stories from the US Forest Service, as told on r/nosleep. I hope that other readers stay with this book, because its one issue is that the first third or so is very slow; some of this is necessary to carefully build the menace and establish the atmosphere of the bog, but I do think McDonald takes too long over introducing a raft of minor characters, almost none of whom end up being especially significant. His prose is beautiful but gets in the way a little in the opening chapters. Having said that, once The Wilding does get going, it does NOT let up, and it's seriously scary. It took me right back to the utter terror of reading Roald Dahl's The Minpins as a child and imagining being in the forest hearing the sounds of the Spittler approaching. I was interested to see that McDonald, a writer I haven't read before, has written mostly science fiction in the past, and I liked how he brought that sensibility to this grounded horror novel, giving us just enough information to make the threat feel specific - the taxonomy of types of sighting! - without tying himself into complicated explanations. Perfect Halloween reading.