When Minn Bellamy and her teenaged son decide to spend their spring hiking the Blue Ridge Mountains, the last thing they expect is to stumble across a town so isolated it seems as if the supernatural has taken them back in time. Warm welcomes quickly turn ominous as mysterious circumstances force them to stay and the strangers’ traditions become increasingly sinister. The townsfolk have ulterior motives, Minn’s past is about to catch up with her, and the aims of the forces in the surrounding forest are far from friendly.
Dark bleatings, my spooky tribe! I’m here to review my first read from one of my brand new very favourite authors ever, S.Q. McGrath. She’s honestly such a talent and I can’t understand how it’s possible that she doesn’t have a much bigger fan base. This novel opens with beautiful writing. Minn and her son Peter are hiking, have veered off the trail, and are lost. They are neither equipped nor experienced enough to rough it in the woods, and are starting to panic. But, much to their luck, lo and behold, they happen upon some sort of commune. Salvation, hooray!
So here’s the deal with these people and the structure of this book. We jump between Minn’s present and her recent past, so we’re following dual timelines and separate journeys within them. I love this as a structural device, and I especially loved it here because we’re not just dipping into Minn’s past for small details or character fleshing – we have what initially seems to be two significant separate stories taking place at different points in her life.
Minn has a twin brother called Wolf, and though they share a rocky childhood of foster home experiences, they’re very close, besties. She also had some sort of significant issue with Peter. On top of these stressful factors, she’s having a sensitive and weird issue at work – she’s a teacher and a troubled student called Isaac is hanging around her too much, he’s taken a weird interest in her. She tries to keep a professional distance but he gets very intense and she finds herself trapped in a dangerous situation.
But in the present, she and Peter are also sort of trapped at the commune. The people are very nice and welcoming, but are using the excuse of a thick fog to keep them there for a festival, rather than showing them the way back to the trail. And they have very strict rules about women and men not sharing certain spaces, and so she and Peter are separated.
Guys, I really can’t put into words how brilliant this book is and how much I loved it. Every time I hit Minn’s past and progressed with that timeline, I got increasingly worried about her situation there. The nightmare with the student was so tense, which I found incredibly impressive considering that I knew that, for where it really counted, it must have resolved okay because this is her past, and so she lived. Running beneath that, there are other details of her life that flowered over time into these horrible little thorns that niggled at me. I got suspicious about certain things in a truly unsettled way.
In her present, I was hit with some serious Midsommer vibes. The community is close-knit, with an unusual – not necessarily bad – hierarchy. Minn and Peter aren’t exactly being held at gunpoint, but where the hell are they meant to go without direction? They’ve heard some weird things out in those woods and going back out there feels even riskier than staying put.
I’ve heard people online recently discussing the term “slow-burn” and how it’s being thrown around inaccurately. This story is a slow-burn in the truest sense – fizzles along nicely getting more and more fiery until it explodes at the end. The pacing is perfect, the information in both past and present fed to us in these little milestone-feeling ways. With every revelation in the past, I was a little more confused about how Minn had come to reach the present, and with every single step forward in the present, my anxiety was shooting up. It is SO tense.
This is for sure folk horror, and folk horror at its finest. The ending is just… well… let’s just say The Wicker Man looks like Disney produced it, by comparison. It’s perfectly set up but also shocking. It starts friendly and tame and then delves into physical horrors that dropped my jaw. It’s so visceral, so unflinchingly brutal, I simply could not believe where it went. S.Q. McGrath ran to the cliff’s edge, dived off, and then instead of deploying the parachute, set it on fire.
I wholeheartedly recommend this to all horror fans. It’s one of the best 5 books I’ve read this year. If you’d like to get a copy or check out the author, I’ve popped some links below for you:
Bleeeat!
Happy Goat Horror 
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