Wild Spaces
Ratings12
Average rating3.8
15
Ratings12
Average rating3.8
Nominated for the 2024 Philip K. Dick Award An Esquire Best of Horror 2023 pick "Without question, one of the most beautifully written books I’ve read this year."—The Wall Street Journal "Can a horror story be beautiful? Wild Spaces tells a terrible truth in the most achingly beautiful way."—Alma Katsu, author of The Fervor Robert R. McCammon’s Boy’s Life meets Lovecraftian horror in this foreboding, sensual coming-of-age debut in which the corrosive nature of family secrets and toxic relatives assume eldritch proportions. An eleven-year-old boy lives an idyllic childhood exploring the remote coastal plains and wetlands of South Carolina alongside his parents and his dog Teach. But when the boy’s eerie and estranged grandfather shows up one day with no warning, cracks begin to form as hidden secrets resurface that his parents refuse to explain. The longer his grandfather outstays his welcome and the greater the tension between the adults grows, the more the boy feels something within him changing —physically—into something his grandfather welcomes and his mother fears. Something abyssal. Something monstrous. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
Reviews with the most likes.
I found Wild Spaces randomly in the new fiction section at the library and the first sentence grabbed me right away. It included ominous foreshadowing of things to come and I just had to know what they were.
A Lovecraftian coming-of-age tale about a boy whose life is completely upended when his mysterious grandfather comes for a visit and refuses to leave, I finished this quick read at the library. It was (of course) very strange and I loved the eerie build-up to the boy's eventual important discovery of the truth about his family and himself.
The boy wishes he was like the land, that he could bury his secrets down deep, hide them until millennia later when what is sharp and dangerous about him could be beautiful, too.
This was alright, but not as good as I hoped it would be. Despite how short the audiobook was, I still kept having to re-wind it because my mind would wander; it just wasn't keeping my attention. The writing was lovely at times, and I loved the boy's relationship with his dog Teach, but everything else was a bit bland and the ending just upset me. Spoiler alert: never trust a book with a dog on the cover.
I'll admit I'm a tough sell with cosmic horror, so someone who enjoys it more might like this better than I did, and I don't regret reading it, but I probably won't be first in line to check out Coney's next release.
Thank you to the publisher and LibroFM for the audio review copy! All thoughts are honest and my own.
✨ Content warnings for: violence, murder, body horror, pet death, grief, drowning, death of a parent
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