The Wilding by Ian McDonald: Review by Gary K. Wolfe

The Wilding, Ian McDonald (Gollancz 978-1-39961-147-3, £25.00, 314pp, hc) September 2024.

Ian McDonald may be one of the most accom­plished SF writers of his generation, but he isn’t particularly known for horror – though that may change with the very creepy ecologi­cal fable The Wilding. I’m using “creepy” in a quite literal sense here: There’s a lot of creeping going on. A project to restore and “rewild” a great bog in rural Ireland somehow awakens ancient forces that threaten to destroy – or possibly absorb – a group of young students on a camping trip which, while described in thor­oughly credible terms, seems almost satirically upscale (glamping pods! Nespresso machines!). After some ominous cattle mutilations and dog disappearances, the bog itself begins to turn on the kids and their guides, first with all sorts of offstage creeping, slithering, knocking, and thrashing sounds, and eventually with violent attacks and apparent efforts at entrapment. It’s not as though McDonald hasn’t shown us over­enthusiastic vegetation before – a strange alien growth took over much of Kenya in Chaga way back in 1995 – but the cause there was pretty clearly extraterrestrial, and McDonald skill­fully used his SF premise to explore themes of colonialism and evolutionary change. There’s virtually no SF rationale for the events of The Wilding, however, and while we learn a good deal about the history, culture, and earlier eco­nomic exploitation of Ireland’s great bogs, the tone is consistently closer to folk horror than to SFnal speculation. And it’s pretty effective folk horror at that.

Set over barely two days in September, The Wilding introduces us to a diverse group of characters who are anything but the familiar stereotypes of rural horror. Lisa Donnan is a skilled driver with a somewhat shady past whose spiritual guide is the poetry of Yeats and who sees a way out of her unrewarding job at a wilding facility by planning to start university in the fall. Ciara is a one-time summer volunteer who has stayed on as an expedition guide, while Michael is the local archeologist and Pádraig is the wordplay-happy supervisor. John O’Dowd and Moya Brennan are longtime residents of the bog region who are visibly impatient with those they still regard as interlopers. When a group of students from Dublin arrive for “two jolly days of fun and scampering,” Lisa decides to lead them into one of the more remote areas of the bog – which proves to be a challenge not only in terms of the strict “pack in pack out” rule prohibiting leaving any traces of human activity in the protected area, but because the students themselves bring their own challenges – espe­cially Saiorse, who at first appears as a snarky and resentful privileged brat, but who proves unexpectedly tough, and the neurodivergent Firaz, whose need for regular meds becomes an important plot point. As the woods become more aggressively feral and threatening, with sightings of enormous beasts and even some violent fatalities, Firaz and Ciara get separated from the main group, splitting the narrative into two parallel survival tales.

McDonald’s depiction of a malevolent bog feels closer to the ancient horrors of Arthur Machen than to more recent explorations of magical woods like Robert Holdstock’s Mythago Wood or, even more recently, Premee Mohamed’s The Butcher of the Forest, and the sense of mounting dread and ancient forces is undeniably powerful, even as some of the middle chapters occasionally seem a bit Blair Witch with all those offstage thrashings and groping, tentacle-like branches. The Wilding doesn’t entirely escape the dilemma posed by most other “nature in revolt” or “nature payback” tales, in that while we’re meant to understand the ecological and cultural significance of rewilding and celebrate the preservation of wildness, the wildness itself becomes the antagonist to be foiled, and even partly destroyed, in the process. Perhaps the point is, as Lisa muses at the end of the novel, that “The border between wild and world was everywhere and nowhere,” and that “Individual lives – plant, animal, human – were moments, but the great life was centuries.” In that sense, The Wilding is simply the tale, told with a beauty and grace that sometimes echoes that of Lisa’s beloved Yeats, of a single skirmish in a universal contest.

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Gary K. Wolfe is Emeritus Professor of Humanities at Roosevelt University and a reviewer for Locus magazine since 1991. His reviews have been collected in Soundings (BSFA Award 2006; Hugo nominee), Bearings (Hugo nominee 2011), and Sightings (2011), and his Evaporating Genres: Essays on Fantastic Literature (Wesleyan) received the Locus Award in 2012. Earlier books include The Known and the Unknown: The Iconography of Science Fiction (Eaton Award, 1981), Harlan Ellison: The Edge of Forever (with Ellen Weil, 2002), and David Lindsay (1982). For the Library of America, he edited American Science Fiction: Nine Classic Novels of the 1950s in 2012, and a similar set for the 1960s. He has received the Pilgrim Award from the Science Fiction Research Association, the Distinguished Scholarship Award from the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts, and a Special World Fantasy Award for criticism. His 24-lecture series How Great Science Fiction Works appeared from The Great Courses in 2016. He has received six Hugo nominations, two for his reviews collections and four for The Coode Street Podcast, which he has co-hosted with Jonathan Strahan for more than 300 episodes. He lives in Chicago.

This review and more like it in the October 2024 issue of Locus.

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