The Wild Hunt

by Emma Seckel

Paperback, 2022

Call number

FIC SEC

Collection

Publication

Tin House Books (2022), 359 pages

Description

"The islanders have only three rules: don't stick your nose where it's not wanted, don't mention the war, and never let your guard down during October. Leigh Welles has not set foot in on the island in years, but when she finds herself called home from a disappointing life on the Scottish mainland by her father's unexpected death, she is determined to forget the sorrows of the past-her mother's abandonment, her brother's icy distance, the unspeakable tragedy of World War II-and start fresh. Fellow islander Iain MacTavish, a RAF veteran with his eyes on the sky and his head in the past is also in desperate need of a new beginning. A young widower, Iain struggles to return to the normal life he knew before the war. But this October is anything but normal. This October, the sluagh are restless. The ominous, bird-like creatures of Celtic legend-whispered to carry the souls of the dead-have haunted the islanders for decades, but in the war's wake, there are more wandering souls and more sluagh. When a local boy disappears, Leigh and Iain are thrown together to investigate the truth at the island's dark heart and reveal hidden secrets of their own. Rich with historical detail and a skillful speculative edge, Emma Seckel's propulsive and pulse-pounding debut The Wild Hunt unwinds long-held tales of love, loss, and redemption"--… (more)

Media reviews

Emma Seckel’s eerie, melodic debut novel, THE WILD HUNT set in the aftermath of World War II, evokes similar anxieties [to du Maurier's The Birds"], only Seckel’s birds are the “sluagh” — airborne “in-between” creatures of Celtic legend. Each October, on an island of “grass and rock
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and heather” off the Scottish coast, a door opens; the “border between this world and the next” grows thin; and the sluagh descend to blacken the sky like “great unnatural clouds,” killing animals and people. Islanders stave off the sluagh as best they can, whispering prayers around bonfires and hiding indoors, but there is no defeating the dark forces of destiny.
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3 more
"Emma Seckel’s The Wild Hunt makes the most of its fraught and carefully bound setting: in the aftermath of World War II, Leigh Welles returns from Edinburgh to her remote Scottish island home in the wake of her father’s death... there are tangible constraints everywhere: the island’s
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surrounding sea, the scarcity of in-home telephones, the limited means of the inhabitants, the paucity of jobs and opportunities, the island’s small size and divisive geography...Spaces of all kinds are closed off, and the most important of these is an old farm, which becomes a site of mystery and discovery... By avoiding any omniscient narration that might settle ... speculative questions too soon, the novel allows the reader to move through the mystery ... beside Leigh and Iain under the same metaphorical and physical constraints that they experience. The result is a meaningful and satisfying conclusion in a story world drawn with exquisite care."
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Scottish islanders are haunted by repressed memories of sons recently lost in World War II, while a flock of birds grows ever more powerful. When Leigh Welles gets the phone call that her father has been in a fatal accident, she returns to her Scottish island home from the mainland. Leigh’s
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homecoming coincides with the annual Oct. 1 return of the crows, who always fly in threes and whom the locals call sluagh—harbingers of death: “They come every October….They look like crows but they carry the dead’s souls.” ... Treading deftly into the worlds of folklore and magical realism, Seckel keenly captures a tone that echoes the eerie moor scenery of the island: hazy, haunting, and teeming with misgivings. A foreboding mystery with surprising glimmers of hope.
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A young man’s disappearance rouses old superstitions in Seckel’s intoxicating and atmospheric debut. Several years after the end of WWII, the death of Leigh Welles’s father brings her back to the Scottish island she grew up on and leaves her feeling unmoored ahead of the arrival of the
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“sluagh,” a flock of supposedly haunted crows that menace the island each October when “the border between this world and the next” is believed to be most porous....Seckel’s descriptions evocatively conjure the roiling dread that permeates the island (“The sluagh had grown so numerous that their once elegant ballets in the air had blacked out the sky. Great unnatural clouds”), underscoring the elegiac reflections on grief and the toll of war. This moody meditation delivers.
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User reviews

LibraryThing member Tip44
To dark and sad, didn't finish
LibraryThing member decaturmamaof2
Beautiful and strange - this story will stay with me for a long time.

Awards

Endeavour Award (Finalist — 2022)
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