It seems that mushrooms are becoming a trending trope in horror. I know they're hardly new but there were always notable gaps in between, say, Hodgson, Lovecraft and Lumley. It was never the in thing. However, this is the second horror novel I've read this month to focus on mushrooms and they follow another one last month. Maybe 'The Last of Us' has sparked a new genre obsession. It wouldn't be a bad thing.

I didn't focus on the mushrooms in my reviews of those other two books to avoid spoilers, which is why I won't tell you which ones they are right now, but there's no spoiler here. The front cover is a photograph of the titular girl in the creek with a forest of mushrooms growing out of her torso. If you're the sort of reader who takes off the dustjacket of a hardcover to read the book, you'll see a large mushroom embossed into the front board. And the first chapter not only uses mushrooms as a simile but goes out of its way to set up the environment in which they thrive; damp and decaying and full of Strangeness.

By the way, we learn that word from a coyote, which is a serious hint as to where this will be going and it's one of the primary reasons why the story failed to deliver any surprises. Maybe I'm being dense and there are a hundred different ways for Wendy Wagner to have tied all these things into a coherent story, but I don't believe so. I'm seeing one and it was hammered home in the opening chapter. And we haven't even met a human being yet, at least one who's alive. And yeah, the girl in the creek is still twitching when we leave her but that doesn't count.

Human beings do show up, even though we spend a lot more time in the Clackamas Forest than we do in the nearby town of Faraday, Oregon. We're there so Erin Harper can search for her brother. Yes, she has an actual paid assignment, writing a tourist article on the town for 'Oregon Traveler', but she's really there to look for Bryan, who vanished five years ago and who's been written off by the authorities as a suicide. She doesn't buy that and wants to look into it, all the more when she sees that other hikers have gone missing too. The current missing poster is Elena Lopez and, you won't be shocked to find that she's the girl in the creek.

Erin has come with a contingent. Her photographer is Hari and he runs a true crime podcast on the side, meaning that he's really there for his own reasons too. While he doesn't know that there's a serial killer in town yet, we do because the coyote told us that Elena's hands were tied behind her back. Suicides don't do that. There's also her friend Matt, his girlfriend Kayla, her sister Madison and his friend in town Dahlia, but I was more drawn to the characters who end up joining the team by accident, meaning Jordan, who Erin recognises in the bar where Elena worked as TrekkinScene on Instagram, and Olivia Vanderpoel, who runs the bed and breakfast she's staying at and whose family used to pretty much run the entire town.

Erin's not a bad character but she doesn't have a lot of charisma, so she struggles to own the book, especially up against Jordan's quiet but knowledgeable support and Olivia's fierce determination. I never got much of an impression of Jordan's age but Olivia's far older than the rest of the cast, yet holds her own when it comes to pretty much everything. She lost her son to whatever's going on in town, though she doesn't believe he's dead and we agree with her when Erin starts to see him and eventually converse with him.

Frankly, this isn't a book to read for the characters. It's not a book to read for the mystery either, the revelation of who's been kidnapping and murdering young women almost an afterthought for readers, as if we pause a moment and think, "oh yeah, we should probably have been figuring out who was behind that all along". We aren't, because we care about the Strangeness or the Strange or whatever the various people and creatures who fill us in about it think of it as. There is more of a mystery there, though again it's a pretty shallow one and I won't bring up any historical context at all because it's such an obvious puzzle piece.

Regardless, all the best aspects of the book tie to being outside in the Clackamas Forest, ready to figure out what the Strangeness is. It's there in the mood, which is a particular shade of ominous. It's there in the feeling of the freedom of the outdoors being threatened by something that rots and corrupts and repurposes. It's there in the sheer speculative logistics of it. Nothing else in the book holds our interest like what the Strangeness is and how it works. Certainly the best horror in the novel involves Elena's body getting up, leaving the morgue and killing someone in their own home. How do you handle that as a forensic investigator?

Unfortunately the Wagner treats it less as a writer of speculative fiction and even a writer of eco-horror, though those are the best scenes in the book, and more like the villain in a fifties monster movie. While we want to understand the Strangeness, her characters, at least the ones who make it out of this story alive, simply don't care and so by extension neither does she. As much as I like a good eco-horror novel, I found myself wishing that this had been speculative fiction instead. ~~ Hal C F Astell