Emma Seckel

A few years after the end of the Second World War, a group of people living on a far-flung Scottish island grapple (or are in denial about) their grief and loss while also dealing with the annual arrival of the supernatural flock of crows known as the sluagh. The sluagh, however, are becoming ever more unpredictable—perhaps even violent.

Emma Seckel is at her strongest when dealing with specific moments of grief that her characters experience, or conjuring up a certain kind of atmospheric landscape. Where The Wild Hunt falls down, though, is that Seckel isn't necessarily able to push beyond "vibes" in her writing. I can accept a level of ambiguity or things left without overt resolution on the page, but the explanation we get for what's been going on—such as it is—just left me half-distracted from the rest of the book's denouement because I kept thinking "but what about..." and "but why then..." Also, while Seckel's unnamed island is atmospheric, it didn't really convince me as being Scottish. For a bunch of reasons to do with dialogue/syntax, but then also just because of some choices which smacked of Seckel really wanting to include what I think of as Misty Celtic Bollocks: Scots Gaelic is, we're told, the island's heritage language which people still speak to some extent and which they intone during the Ancient Clifftop Rituals. Except we're also told that this fictional island is very far in the North Sea, somewhere north and east I think of the Shetlands and with Norway not so far away—how was Gaelic the language spoken there? And not Norn? Gaelic is historically western Mainland/the Hebrides, not in the Shetlands.

Readable, with some nice passages, but not one that I'll be coming back to.… (altro)