The crumbling summerhouse called Wild Fell, soaring above the desolate shores of Blackmore Island, has weathered the violence of the seasons for more than a century. Built for his family by a 19th-century politician of impeccable rectitude, the house has kept its terrible secrets and its darkness sealed within its walls. For a hundred years, the townspeople of Alvina have prayed that the darkness inside Wild Fell would stay there, locked away from the light. Jameson Browning, a man well acquainted with suffering, has purchased Wild Fell with the intention of beginning a new life, of letting in the light. But what waits for him at the house is devoted to its darkness and guards it jealously. It has been waiting for Jameson his whole life - or even longer. And now, at long last, it has found him!
Michael Rowe is an independent international journalist who has lived in Beirut, Havana, Geneva, and Paris.
His work has appeared in the National Post, The Globe & Mail, The United Church Observer and numerous other publications. He has been a finalist for both the Canadian National Magazine Award and the Associated Church Press Award in the United States. The author of several books, including Writing Below the Belt, a critically acclaimed study of censorship, pornography, and popular culture, and the essay collections Looking For Brothers and Other Men's Sons, which won the 2008 Randy Shilts Award for Nonfiction, he has also won the Lambda Literary Award. He is currently a contributing writer to The Advocate and a political blogger for The Huffington Post.
this is a very typical ghost story in some ways, and a very atypical one in others. it has all the hallmarks of classic horror: secluded house with a dark past, small town whose history continues to haunt its residents, uninformed stranger arriving to shake things up, ghostly childhood playmates, mysterious accidents, nightmares, and some brain trauma and memory loss to keep it good and ambiguous. but it brings new things to the table like a preoccupation with gender identity and a surprising conclusion which will affect and maybe even infect the entire preceding tale, making you want to go back to the beginning and approach it with new eyes. or, rather, a new understanding. you can keep the eyes you have.
i had heard great things about rowe's first book, , and how it rejuvenated the vampire story and made it viable again. and i meant to read it, but just hadn't gotten around to it yet, but seeing what he did here with the classic ghost story, i am very eager to give it a read now.
at the end of the day, there is nothing truly revolutionary here, until the ending comes to getcha, but that is enough. it is an engaging ghost story with a highly sympathetic main character in jamie, as it slowly leads you through his lonely formative years with his loving father, his unloving mother, and his one friend: a tomboy named lucinda who goes by hank. he also has a secret mirror-friend named amanda, but after a horrific accident which he believes she is the cause of, he effectively banishes her and forgets all about her.
but amanda is patient, and she has a long memory.
all grown up now, jamie comes into some money, and decides to buy the large estate crumbling all alone on blackmore island, off the coast of alvina, ontario, to turn into a bed and breakfast. once he arrives, he experiences troubling episodes both in the house itself, and back on shore with the townspeople.
things escalate, as they do in a ghost story, and jamie learns that the past can certainly be forgotten but forgetting doesn't make it any less dangerous.
i enjoyed his writing style, and the pacing is exactly what you want and expect form a psychological suspense/supernatural story. very slow and deliberate until it isn't. it is playing for more than scares, though, and it is full of sadness and all the various quiet horrors of childhood, adulthood, and death itself.
Let me begin this review with how I came about reading this. My 카지노싸이트 pal, Regina, presented myself and a few others with a challenge. Pick a # between 1 and 100 and find that corresponding book on your TBR shelf and read it by April. Knock one off the backlist so to speak. My # was 68 which coincided with Wild Fell a book I may or may not have ever gotten to. Well a HUGE thank you to Regina because I really, really enjoyed this.
"I want to teach you about fear. I want to tell you a ghost story. It’s not a ghost story like any ghost story you’ve ever heard. It’s my ghost story, and it’s true. It happened here in the house on Blackmore Island called Wild Fell, in the inland village of Alvina, Ontario on the shores of Devil’s Lake. Like any ghost story, it involves the bridges between the past and the present and who, or rather what, uses them to cross from the world of the living into the world of the dead."
I adored our main character of Jameson "Jamie" Browning. We spend time learning about his childhood in which he was ostracized by his peers. We learn about his bestfriend Lucinda that prefers to go by Hank and the deep bond the two of them share. We learn about his close relationship with his loving father and the less than loving relationship with his cold mother. We also learn about Amanda who is a girl that is reflected in his mirror that has an uncanny ability of "making things happen" through sheer magic thinks 9 year old Jameson.
At around the 60% mark is when Jameson actually purchases Wild Fell which normally would have irritated me. Like, come on let's get to it already. However, the backstory of Jamie's past is so rich and necessary in telling this tale that it also allows the reader to develop feelings for him, to care about him, which ultimately keeps you invested in what is happening around him.
"And this is how legends begin in small northern towns on the edge of places other people only drive through on their way to somewhere else: with a scream in the dark, and half a century passed in waiting."
Michael Rowe where have you been all my life? What a fine, fine writer he is. His prose is eloquent and lyrical which is something you don't always see from horror writers. This is a very literary ghost story and one in which I enjoyed very much.
I do have a copy of his other book Enter, Night (Vampires! 🧛♂️ ) on my kindle and I am super excited to read that now. 4 *Don't look in the mirror* stars!
Since I read Enter, Night , I've been wanting to check out Wild Fell. I'm sorry that I waited so long!
Wild Fell is told in such a unique manner , (I love that!), that it's hard to tear yourself away. Normal day to day chores like cooking dinner, doing dishes and such, all fell by the wayside in favor of parking my butt on the couch,(or by the river on my lunch hour), to see where this novel would take me. It took me a number of places, but it finished with me at Wild Fell itself.
Jameson Browning is our protagonist. As a boy he was bullied and had a best friend, a girl named Hank. From there, we follow Jameson throughout his life and finally, his time at Wild Fell. He's a good guy and a good friend and he fell upon hard times-it's easy to like and root for him.
All is not as it seems with Jameson, though, and getting to what is REAL is part of the mystery of this book. It's not a ghost story, it's not a haunted house story....but actually it is both, plus some.
Unlike the author, I do not have the right words to explain how this book made me feel. I will paraphrase from Jack Nicholson and his line from the movie "As Good as it Gets" , this book makes me wish I were a better reviewer.
Highly recommended to fans of quiet horror, dark fiction, mysteries, ghost stories and haunted house tales.
It is extremely rare, I've found, to find a ghost story that actually gives me chills. I'm a grown-ass man, after all. I've got a full-time job and bills to pay; what's scarier than THAT?
This book gave me chills. There are some straight-up creepy as hell parts.
And when you get to the end, you realize that either the book you started isn't the same one you've finished, or you're simply not the same person who started reading the book.
This book had a lot of promise once the sexy teen/ghost story trope prologue was out of the way. “I want to teach you about fear,” says Jameson Browning. “I want to tell you a ghost story.” Okay, please do! The story of Jamie’s formative years, with his kindly father, uber-tomboy best friend & the girl in the mirror that he tells his secrets to is pretty swell. The first 78 pages are excellent reading with a nice flutter of creepiness, and they get bonus points from me for the chilling comeuppance laid on the neighborhood bully that’s relatively bloodless, yet horrifically gory .
After the deliberate pacing of these first pages, though, the rest of the book feels rushed, like Rowe was on a deadline & couldn’t figure out how to end things. Creepiness abates. Jamie is hurried through the next several years of his life & many important events are treated to a few paragraphs at best. As an adult, he is drawn towards a meeting with his “Mirror Pal,” as of course he must be since he’s in this book, but there’s no clear catalyst for this or reason for why it even needs to happen. Forcing the plot to fit into the last fifty or so 50 or so pages isn’t necessarily a two-star-worthy crime in & of itself; hey, lots of books fall off a bit in the end & I also know that I’m picky about what scares me, so I’m willing to be flexible if a book doesn’t keep me spooked. What I shake my fist at here is the ridiculously bad editing & the lazy, inexplicable ending.
This book claims on the copyright page to have had an editor, a copyeditor, and a proofreader & this news just makes me hang my head. The nurse that takes care of Jamie’s father is first named Ardelia, then several pages later it’s Bedelia, then back to Ardelia again. Hello, copyeditor? In an unintentionally chortle-worthy bit meant to demonstrate that Jamie’s mom is So Evil, she uses a bag of raw meat to tempt a neighborhood dog into doing something awful to an reptile (without being too spoiler-y, this is really one of the most over-the-top bizarre scenes I've read in recent memory), then a few sentences later the dog is driven on by the smell of cooked flesh. Um, proofreader? Stuff like this makes me weary mainly because I’m just sitting here on my couch on my day off catching these glaring errors – how were they missed by the people who get paid to notice these things?
Then the twist at the end that pretty much craps on everything that came before it - I can’t even begin with how disappointed I am with this. . Almost anything else could’ve happened here to tie the present Jamie & the past Amanda together & the fact that this was the ridiculous route that Rowe took leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
A ghost story with some macabre thematic elements, ‘Wild Fell’ by Michael Rowe is a journey into scary territory. A playmate who appears in the mirror only to a nine year old boy, a gothic mansion built in the 1800s with a gruesome history, and bullies destined for their comeuppance will accompany you along the way. Rowe’s writing is atmospheric and so descriptive, it’s easy to visualize the landscape and the characters.
Blackmore mansion is isolated on an island near Alvina, Canada. It can be reached only by boat. Attended by the requisite fog, things become misty and unclear; vision cannot be trusted. Rowe gives an introduction to what can happen near Blackmore Mansion in the prologue. It plunged me into all the scary stories I heard as a kid. When my Father wanted my sister and me to go to sleep at night, he would knock on the walls of his bedroom and call out loudly, “Rawhide and Bloody Bones.” He never told us the tale, only called for the demon to come and get us. We quickly calmed down and went to sleep. That might explain my fear of evil things hiding under my bed. At any rate, Rowe’s prologue story raises childhood fears and anxieties, exactly as it’s meant to do.
We meet Jameson Browning at the age of nine in 1971, just as he’s about to go off to summer camp. A loner, Jamie distrusts boys his own age and befriends a neighborhood girl, Lucinda, who prefers to be called ‘Hank.’ Hank is a tomboy, capable of everything that Jamie is not. She rides bikes faster than anyone Jamie knows, builds tree forts, and catches tadpoles. Rowe relates Jamie’s adventures in a way that I begin to care about him and to be fearful for him. Jamie is a fearful little boy. Rowe is able to invoke the unconscious fears most of us had as children; the extreme feelings of powerlessness and loss of control in day to day events soon overtake Jamie. Mirror Pal is invoked when Jamie starts talking to his mirror. One day something or someone talks back to him from the mirror. Is she a playmate or something other?
The reader will follow Jamie into adulthood, where he has become an altogether different person. He’s bulked up and capable, no longer the thin, frail boy. But we remember him as what he was in the beginning. We trust that all those childhood fears are still there, intact and simmering just underneath a superficial exterior. Rowe will explore his relationships with his parents, both as a child and the man he becomes. How Blackmore mansion enters Jamie's life is fascinating but will raise questions in the reader.
I do not often read horror and ghost stories, but this one was well worth my time. Enjoyed very much and recommend for readers who enjoy this genre or want to explore it as I did.
A short but effective read. Three stories woven into one narrative and a building sense of dread throughout. Without giving too much away, I loved the ending and the final reveal. It was surprising and unexpected but not a cop-out in any way. This was a good way to spend a few days and I recommend this to anyone who likes the subtle horror of writers like John Ajvide Lindqvist or Christopher Buehlman and not body counts and gore.
A ghost story with a twist. Wild Fell leads you down into the basement and closes the door. The middle was slow but the ending more than made up for that. 4 very dark stars.
What's spooky...is someone finding this novel spooky...
Possible spoilers ahead so read at your peril:
I bought this book because it was recommended as being atmospheric and spooky...what is really spooky is that anyone would find this story spooky...As for atmospheric...it rained heavily on one page of this slow-moving novel...
The tale begins with a long prologue relating the ill-fated date of Sean and Brenda...their date from hell becoming the local legend of Blackmore Island and the ramshackle house on its grounds...
That was by far the most interesting portion of the story...and that's not saying much...Jump ahead a few generations to a young boy called Jamie and his playmate, a girl called Hank...that's right, Hank...BFFs spending their summers together...
At the 45% mark, jump ahead again about 30 years and enjoy a real yawn-o-rama...Jamie briefly marries and divorces... Hank comes out of the closet...
This story started out with a predictable legend that fell flat on its behind and never recovered...
I stopped reading this mind-numbing novel at 50%. The spookiest thing about this book is that some poor soul might decide to buy it and try it...
In Wild Fell, Rowe reminds us that we create reality through memory, construct it out of flashes of neurons… and that reality can change as our memories change. Nothing is fixed, nothing static, but all shiftings of sleep sand and illusions. Wild Fell serves as a dark reminder that everything about our identity is changeable – gender, identity, personality, and desire. Our bodies and spirits interact in complex ways, and nothing about ourselves is stationary. Rowe explores the way we can change with changes in our memories, exploring the relationship between abuse and forgetting – memories that are erased due to trauma that re-surface late like an island in the centre of a dark lake. Wild Fell is made timeless by the abuse within its walls, the haunting return of the repressed – the shattered glass of our mirrored, reflected selves.
If you are interested in checking out a longer version of my review, check out my website at
The narrator ruined this one for me. He read in a robotic voice. I bought the kindle book and added the narration so I may try reading it one day in the far future. I got a refund for the audible part. Just read this one.
From the first page, I had the feeling nothing was what it seemed. And the ending proved me right. Loved it. Great story, great atmosphere, great writing.
Un petit chef d'oeuvre de la littérature horrifique façon Ghost-story, qui tient en haleine du début à la fin. On s'attend à tout moment à une apparition, on tente de comprendre où l'auteur veut nous embarquer et surtout ce que cache cette mystérieuse histoire. Tout simplement fascinant. Je vous le recommande chaudement !
Wild Fell begins in the small town of Alvina, Ontario, in 1960, when Sean Schwartz asks his high school sweetheart, Brenda Egan, if she believes in ghosts. Whether he’s trying to scare her into cuddling closer, looking for some excitement to end the summer before school begins again, or is entirely sincere in his question, his question is a prelude to asking Brenda if she’ll cross a mile of Devil’s Lake to Blackmore Island to explore the remains of a mansion called Wild Fell. It takes some persuading, but Brenda reluctantly agrees, only to change her mind when they’re halfway there, suddenly frightened. Sean is disappointed, maybe angry, but the evening is saved by an illicit bottle of wine and a bonfire. But Wild Fell isn’t done with them, and the curtain of the prologue falls as a legend begins.
Michael Rowe sets his hook firmly with this prologue, but then he lets the line out for a nice long run. Jameson Browning — Jamie — tells us the story in the first person, starting, “I want to teach you about fear.” That sentence recedes from the reader’s mind as Jamie relates the story of his childhood in Alvina with a warm, loving father and a cold, unhappy mother. He is a reclusive child with only one real friend, Hank. Hank is really named Lucinda, but she doesn’t much want to be a girl, as she’s recently demonstrated by cutting off her hair. Hank is better at being a boy than Jamie is, really, and their friendship is a true one that involves no secrets.
Well, except for one: Jamie never tells Hank about Amanda, the girl who lives in his mirror. Amanda has Jamie’s face and speaks in his voice, but she’s completely real. She started as an imaginary playmate of Jamie’s own gender, someone to share victories and grievances with. But when eight-year-old Jamie complains to his mirror that his bike has been stolen by an older child, the presence in the mirror becomes a separate person, not an echo. She still uses his throat, his voice, but the words she speaks are not his, and the reflection in the mirror is not of his body or his room. She asks what he wants to happen to the boy who stole his bike, and Jamie says he wants the kid to just shut up and give him his bike back. Amanda promises that this will happen. And it does. Oh, boy, does it ever.
We don’t find out who Amanda is for a long time, not for the rest of Jamie’s childhood, not during his young adulthood in Toronto, not until much later when he returns to Alvina. In the meantime, though, we come to enjoy Jamie’s company. We see him through college and into marriage and a teaching career; being cared for and then caring for his father; and, ultimately, making a purchase in Alvina that will decide his fate. Always, lurking in the background, whether he acknowledges her or not, Amanda haunts his steps. By the time we find out who she was, and what she wants with Jamie, it feels like she’s meddling with a good friend.
Rowe has meticulously plotted this ghost story, so that nothing feels extraneous and every word seems carefully chosen. There is a sexual ambiguity to Jamie that colors the story, but is never overt, a suggestion; just as the violence is muted, always offstage and related to Jamie afterwards. The horror in this story isn’t graphic, but it is very much present.
Rowe writes beautifully, with words that draw pictures and bring memories to life. Here, for example, is a passage describing Alvina, and other small summer resort towns, from the prologue:
"Legends begin in small northern towns on the edge of places other people only drive through on their way to somewhere else, in station wagons and vans full of summer gear: Muskoka chairs in bright summer colours, coolers full of beer, canvas bags bursting with swimsuits and shorts and t-shirts, and dogs who slumber on blankets in the back seat and are bored by the entire process of long car trips.
"Towns pass by that are the sum of their parts, and their parts are bridges, barns, fields, and roadside stands where home-baked pies or fresh ice cream are sole in the summer, and pumpkins, sweet corn, and Indian corn in the autumn. These towns are for gas stations that are distance markers for exhausted parents, where the kids can have one final bathroom break before the last stretch of highway leading to driveways that in turn lead to front doors and lake views….
"The towns they pass might as well be shell facades, their residents merely extras in a movie called Our Drive Up North to the Cottage, a movie with annual sequels whose totality makes up a lifetime of holiday memories."
When I was a child, we had a place we visited during the summer that was just like that, though a country away. And when I was a child, the ends of long summer evenings, those long, slow twilights during which the shadows got longer and longer, and anything could be hiding behind the bridal veil or under the willow fronds, were eerie and frightening. That feeling, too, is what Rowe has captured in this novel, a lingering, cold dread.
Wild Fell is one of the best books of 2013. And Rowe is a talent to watch.
2011 saw the publication of one of the best and scariest modern vampire novels with Enter, Night. Now Michael Rowe's second horror novel, Wild Fell, is doing for ghosts what Enter, Night did for vampires.
Much like Enter, Night before it, Wild Fell takes place in Ontario and takes a structurally interesting approach. The main narrative of Enter, Night ended after 340 pages and was followed by a 70 page coda, a translation of an old document which cleared up a lot of the backstory/history behind the vampire infestation of Parr's Landing. The coda can stand as a novella of it's own, and was a unique, fun way to wrap up the novel.
Wild Fell is a bit unorthodox as well, with the narrator not even getting to the "haunted house" until the majority of the book has passed. This doesn't reflect badly on the story whatsoever, and further cements the idea that Wild Fell is a ghost story as opposed to a typical haunted house story. Fraught with themes such as gender identity and exploration of memory and memory loss, Rowe's sophomore novel is a literary ghost story that can stand with the best of it's kind.
Rowe does a great job with his characters, and his narrator Jameson Browning is an easy man to sympathize with, as he's had his fair share of disappointments and tragedies throughout his life. From the beginning of Jameson's (or Jamie, as he is mostly referred to) narrative, it becomes clear that his problems start at a young age of childhood. Childhood always makes for a wonderful setting for horror, as it's a period in everyone's life in which exists a certain, special blend of magic, awe, and terror that dissipates as we grow into a different perspective. While the magic and awe seem to disappear, the terror and trauma can often bury itself deep, bleeding over into life later on, and the narrative is a perfect example of this, with Jamie forgetting many things which he remembers later on as he recounts his tale.
The author is just as on point with the pacing as he is with his narrator, and although the volume clocks in at a slimmer page count than his first novel, it doesn't slow down at all and instead picks up speed as it cannonballs to it's gloriously creepy conclusion with an ending many readers will not see coming.
Wild Fell is the novel I ended 2013 with, and one that I could hardly put down. It is, without a doubt, one of the strongest ghost novels I've had the pleasure of reading, and easily alternates traditional ghost story tropes with a take that's entirely fresh and new. This one should be high on everyone's to-read list.
Originally appeared on my blog, The Arkham Digest.
After finishing Enter, Night by Michael Rowe; I was so taken with his writing decided to read Wild Fell next. Once again I found his writing beautiful, close to poetry in places, and my attention kept drifting as I marveled at his use of words and then I had to reread it to pick up the storyline.
My problem with the book is the ending left me so confused. I don't mean I did not understand what was written, don't need it spelled out or anything. It is just that when the end comes it is like a big thud of information dumped on your brain. Mr. Rowe did not give any breadcrumbs throughout the book that would help your mind understand the ending. I guess the best way to describe it would be the ending was not satisfying even though I loved the book.
I don’t remember where but I was keen about “Wild Fell: A Ghost Story”, as soon as I read the synopsis. It was in the +$16.00 CDN range I avoid, even for new books. If I recall right, it was ordered as my choice of a reading group prize, a delightful way I have earned other pricey books. Michael Rowe is Canadian and this looked like a tantalizingly unique ‘paranormal mystery’, an accurate adjective. The end contained an unexpectedly hot erotic scene, whew! Too bad dementedness followed.
The deciding factor is that this novel is not the metaphysical adventure many of us want but ‘horror’, with the genre’s tendency for insurmountable situations. I seek wondrous spiritual encounters, benign like they are in the real world. This antagonist was awfully evil. The best I could give after a dear, innocent turtle died, was 3 stars. Readers accustomed to no win conclusions might love this different author and angle, published fairly recently in 2013. Numerous stories are about hauntings in specific places and ways. It is scary to think of a malevolence luring you long-distance!
Here is what I easily praise. We got to know Jameson gradually since he was a little boy and his mutually adoring Dad, Mr. Browning. Liking them is guaranteed. If you are not a fan of ‘horror’, thank goodness the madness was gradual. This is quality reading. Michael is a beautiful writer and a sympathetic narrator.
I especially wanted the book because it mentioned Midland, Ontario around Georgian Bay. As Canadians, it is neat when characters at least drive by places that are familiar to us! The spookiness, vibrant Ontario woods on an island, and originality of the bizarreness were excellent. Algernon Blackwood, who memorialized Ontario lakes and woods, was quoted herein. I simply demand happy endings.
First off, a rather long prologue featuring two soon-to-be dead teens with fairly developed backstories, but really aren't important to the rest of the story except as the subjects of a tragic cautionary tale and reason for townfolk to feel superstitious about an abandoned mansion on an island nearby.
Then, a pretty solid story about the protagonist and his troubled childhood, with some very creepy occurrences. We learn a lot about little bullied boy Jameson, his unhappily married parents, his best friend, and his imaginary friend in the mirror, and become invested in his life. But before getting into his haunted youth, grown-up Jameson buys Wild Fell, the abandoned mansion--sight unseen, by the way--so we know he winds up owning the house from the prologue. It gets weird when the author feels the need to throw in a few pages about what happened in Jameson's life between the ages of nine and forty-something, which feels like a quickly sketched outline.
Jameson finally visits the house he bought for the first time, as well as the closest town. Everyone in town is familiar with drownings that occurred in the lake nearby, but they are barely aware of the notorious Blackmore family who built and inhabited Wild Fell. Jameson continually embarrasses himself by asking dumb questions. The writing really starts to suffer (Mr Brocklehurst asks Jameson's name two pages after calling him by name, for example), the dialogue becomes repetetive and unimaginative, and the story just....fails. The worst part is probably the final repulsive "twist", which could be interpreted as either Jameson facing a horrible truth he has repressed or Jameson having his mind and memories seriously messed with.
It seems like the author ran out of steam and just didn't care anymore, which is unfortunate, because this could have been a really great ghost story.
I kind of have mixed feelings about this one.Some aspects I loved, some i disliked. The first half of the novel has a seriously erie,unsettling vibe to it. You really get the idea thay something is just off. The second half is still gripping and well written. Buttt... like others have stated it just seems rather rushed. It's as if the author just got so excited with his idea that he just couldnt wait to get to the climax. I did notice a few subtle holes/mistakes in the second half. ie. characters knowing each others names before introducing themselves. On the other hand I enjoyed Rowes no "mumbo jumbo" approach to the tale. Wild Fell was right to the point, I wasnt given the opportunity to lose interest. Perhaps this was the authors intentions. If so well done! Oh! I also loved how it takes place in Ontario. Several locations I see everyday were mentioned which I find kind of neat. "Enter Night" is next.
So I picked this up because it was billed as a Gothic ghost story...I was very disappointed. The first chapter is pretty good and decently scary. That is where it stops, the book then spends the next 100 or so pages (it's only a 180 page book) detailing the life of Jamie, his lonely childhood and best friend Hank (a girl who wants to be a boy) there is a bunch of normal kid stuff with the added bonus of a semi creepy "imaginary" friend named Amanda who lives in his mirror and a dead turtle.
Amanda is only in about two chapters and while she seems a bit evil and I could tell it was important for later, the author then goes into Jaime growing up, graduating school, getting married, divorced and finally his dad getting Alzheimer's. Jamie has to put his dad in a home, then gets into a horrible accident and gets a butt load of money with which he buys a huge rambling house called Wild Fell. He buys it sight unseen aside from the pictures and even though it's a rambling estate no one has lived in for years, it is in perfect condition;and has "not aged."
Finally we get to the good stuff, the house is awesome, description great, history of the Blackmore family creepy and tragic; incest, death, and old money. There was some magic that seemed out of place for the type of story being told however and a really gross scene where Jamie has an R rated dream about his dad. Then we get to the meat of the whole story (keep in mind at this point we are about ten pages from the end)
The reason this got two stars was because the good stuff was SO brief. less than 1/4 of the novel is about the house and the evil ghost that lives in it. Two of the three twists were totally predictable and stereotyped. Then there was the biggest twist of all, which was just ridiculous and very, "timey wimey" but not in a fun Doctor Who kind of way. &The ending was confusing and rushed and made me just go, "meh, eh and BORED NOW!"
There were also no rules, weird magic, and a all powerful ghost. I kid you not, she could do ANYTHING, control ANYTHING,. This ghost has no Achilles heel, no rules, just an unlimited supply of evil and power with no logical (or even illogical) back story about how she got this power. In the end I was just done with this book.
This is an oddly-structured book with weird pacing. There is an overly-long prologue in which the reader is given time to care about a character, before it abruptly ends and the characters in the prologue never show up again except as footnotes to the protagonist's horror story. I'm someone who is easily scared (one of the few in the world who found The Blair Witch Project terrifying, ffs) and this book was only kind of chilling and creepy in parts (mainly the part that was told from the POV of the protagonist as a child). But there was also a lot of exposition that verged on the banal and halfway through I was not at all creeped out, just impatient.
Some solid writing in parts that conveyed a menacing atmosphere, but mostly the writing is dull and prosaic. The final scene where the TRUTH is revealed is so ridiculous, I don't even know what to say. It's a bit of an insult to have spent time with the book and be given THAT. Some really half-baked Freudian undertones meant to increase the dread/horror, I suspect, but it was just crudely done, and without much consideration for the emotional and psychic toll on the kids in question beyond "the return of the repressed" that is explored in a really hamfisted way. So in that sense, it feels opportunistic and gross. Also, all the women characters, be it mothers, ghosts, or butch lesbian best friends "with a man's soul" (?) were terrible and vengeful (because mothers and heterosexual women) or vaguely distant but supportive (because butch lesbian is, as emphasised a few times, not some "radical dyke" as a male character puts it but a cool one who is almost a man). The gender binary is awkwardly sketched out in broad strokes that I thought the latter part of the story and the denouement would redeem it somewhat in terms of "troubling" gender and undoing the earlier narrative voice, destabilising the whole damn thing, but no.
What puzzles me so much is that this book is not uniformly bad; there were parts when it was shaping up to be a real psychological slow-burn of a ghost story, but then it just fizzled. Most unfortunate.
This is a relatively short book, and yet it packs a heavy punch. I took my time reading it in short sessions, the way you might carefully sip a fine and expensive scotch, mostly because I was enjoying the experience so much that I wanted it to last. Rowe's smooth prose makes holding back like that both difficult and yet an utterly satisfying experience, much like you might want to gulp that scotch but will be far better served in careful and gracious sips.
I love the way that this ghost story beautifully conjures elements from classic Gothic literature and yet at the same time pushes the boundaries of the genres and takes the reader to new places and eerie, unsettling and unexpected moments. Rowe paints with a brush that tickles the deepest and darkest internal and buried fears.
It's continually fascinating that in both Wild Fell and his previous novel Enter, Night, Rowe does for Ontario what Stephen King did for New England; he both honours and re-invents classic horror tropes into a local modern setting, creating a multi-dimensional appreciation and multi-layered experience for the reader. While reading I experienced the best of the satisfaction of reading something I was familiar with while at the same time experiencing a thrill of the unique and unexpected.
Like I said, Michael Rowe's writing is on par with delighting in the complex and multi-layered textures and tastes of a very fine and very rare scotch. So, go ahead, reach for that uniquely shaper ornately crafted bottle, pull the top off, absorb the peaty scent that has been eagerly waiting to be released, pour it into your glass . . . and enjoy . . .
When it comes to building slow suspense while carving out fully-realized human characters, Michael Rowe is a master craftsman. This isn't a breakneck book. Despite its relatively short length (my only complaint), this novel pulls you along at a luxuriant pace, letting the tension build like a room that's slowly having the air sucked out. You won't notice you're out of breath until it's way too late to open a window. In both character construction and setting, Rowe reminds me of . He gets the sense of alienation and otherness that is the lifeblood of small town horror. In the way was about (reluctantly) going home again, Wild Fell is about the alienation of not fitting in and trying to find a place where you can truly be yourself -- If that place really exists and will let you move in. The worst part of this novel is finishing it and realizing that he hasn't yet written his next.
I'm an easily scared person when reading horror or ghost stories, but honestly the scariest thing about this book was the cover photo! It dragged for large parts of what is a short novel, making it feel much longer. The protagonist frustrated me repeatedly by not connecting obvious things together and often he gave me that annoyed old school horror film feeling of, "No! Don't go in there!" I kept waiting for a spooky pay-off at the end for the somewhat laborious set-up and instead finished up the book feeling kind of icky and wishing I had my afternoon back.
I gave it 2 stars rather than one because the writing was decent. I'm afraid the same can't be said of the storytelling.
But in this case, by candlelight, in spite of the veneer of ducal hauteur in this portrait of the laird of Wild Fell, the face rendered here was the face of a monster.
The surface of the painting had been slashed with some kind of long, sharp instrument. There were no jagged edges; rather the cuts appeared to have been made almost lovingly, as though the vandal in question had taken his or her time and profoundly enjoyed the sensation of carving Alexander Blackmore’s face into strips.
I shuddered and turned the portrait away from me, facing it against the side of the crate. At that moment, a cold draft wafted through the basement, and I distinctly heard a soft sigh from the darkness behind me. The flame of my candle flickered, then went out. I heard something behind the locked third door, something that sounded like a piece of furniture being dragged across a stone floor.
I didn’t wait for the scraping sound to repeat itself. I turned tail and stumbled as fast as I could back through the basement. When I found the stairs, I took them three at a time, as though the light from the kitchen windows was oxygen and I had been buried alive in the dark.
***
The town of Alvina, Ontario, some 3,000 souls strong, is a quaint, summer destination with, like so many towns of its ilk, a Main Street, a busy season, and a dark history shrouded in secrets and death.
Wild Fell opens in 1960, with a pair of young teenage lovers: Sean “Moose” Schwartz and Brenda Egan. The two Alvina residents go for a late drive one night, winding up on the shore of Devil’s Lake near Blackmore Island where, in glorious horror fashion, they almost immediately start making out. Of course, being a horror story, their make-out session results in nothing good (save for the hauntingly beautiful shroud of moths on page 22).
Following this extended prologue, the novel switches gears—and perspectives—and we’re introduced to Wild Fell’s true protagonist, the sympathetic, forty-year-old divorcé and former English teacher Jameson Browning. Though we’re introduced to Jameson as an adult, the narrative quickly jumps back in time to 1971, where we see him as a young boy, before progressing through the steps leading back to adulthood. Jameson, however, isn’t a typical boy; he’s shy and mistrustful of other boys his age. His only real friend is Lucinda “Hank” Brevard, a tomboy and a source of frustration for Jameson’s über-conservative mother. Together, Jameson and Hank are balanced in their traditional gender-role inversion—she being the more masculine of the two, and he a delicate flower of a child, a personality reflected more in his soft-hearted father than his icy, cruel mother.
Beyond Hank, Jameson confides in his “mirror pal” whom he imagines as his self externalized. It isn’t long, however, before imaginary mirror pal becomes not-so imaginary Amanda, a girl—an apparition—who appears one day in the mirror in Jameson’s bedroom and speaks to him in his own voice. Though seemingly benign at first, it isn’t until Jameson’s new bike is stolen from him by an older bully that he gets his first taste of the dark power that has visited him in the guise of a young girl.
As we return to Jameson the adult, post-divorce, post-accident which has left him with a considerable amount of disposable cash, we see a man who has forgotten much of his past—including the dangerous apparition in his mirror—and who is in need of something to act as a distraction from his current life of loneliness and concern over his father, who is now suffering with Alzheimer’s. On impulse, Jameson purchases, sight unseen, the historic house Wild Fell on Blackmore Island, on sale for a steal of a price, with every intention of turning it into a summer bed and breakfast. It isn’t long, however, before Jameson’s past, and indeed the history of Blackmore Island itself, clambers to the surface once more.
As was the case with 2011’s Enter, Night, which upended the vampire mould in interesting and unexpected ways, author Michael Rowe offers up a new type of ghost story in Wild Fell. Absent from Jameson and Amanda’s story are things like rattling chains and spectres passing through walls, somehow leaving ectoplasmic residue on surfaces. In place of these tropes, the author has injected the narrative with psychological unrest and confusion, and layers of misdirection, beginning with the division between the prologue and the rest of the novel.
Like Enter, Night, which opened with a multi-chapter prologue of sorts, Wild Fell begins with a story so complete and tonally different from what’s to come that it feels like one story nested inside another. This feeling is increased when, upon being introduced to Jameson, the narrative switches from third-person to first. Beyond simply shifting perspective, though, the overall tone of the writing changes as well. The prologue is a disturbing, sexy, and heavily atmospheric scene that simultaneously plays to the expectation of doomed teenage lovers while at the same time carving the outline of its own unique mythology—an outline that is later filled in by Jameson’s more elegantly written, almost provincial tale. Unlike Enter, Night, in which I felt the length and pacing of the prologue detracted somewhat from the larger tale that followed, the opening to Wild Fell feels like an essential, swiftly-told kernel around which Jameson’s future and fate are determined.
As previously stated, much of Wild Fell is written with a careful elegance that really sells the delicate nature of Jameson’s personality—one that is as at odds with the brashness of the boys at camp in his youth as it is with his own mother, and later on, his wife, Ame. While Hank is in some ways equally brash, the connection they share, forged in childhood, is a near-perfect example of brotherly love. In fact, it is the relationships between Jameson and Hank, and Jameson and his father that provide Wild Fell with its emotional core, as well as its greatest ammunition for tragedy.
Going a step further, Rowe nails the discomforting gulf in the parent/child dynamic across both Jameson’s parents, achieving a hateful, mendacious character in Jameson’s mother, a truly horrid, heartless person (and through her actions, is placed right up there with the deplorable Lemmy Drinkwater and his dog fighting ways from Craig Davidson’s Cataract City). When contrasted with Jameson’s father, who is portrayed as about as loving and caring as a father could be, her actions and mannerisms seem that much more despicable. If there were ever a woman unfit for motherhood…
The overall narrative to Wild Fell doesn’t hinge on an elaborate plot or attempt rewrite the rules of the genre so much as it simply infuses it with a strong dose of character and a legitimate sense of history—Jameson’s history, and that of Blackmore Island. The connection between Jameson and Amanda, the girl in the mirror, is not so much the heart of the protagonist’s arc, as it might be in a lesser novel, but the twisting, turning knife boring a hole through his very finely tuned exterior. As carefully manicured a personality as Jameson has, it’s rather tightly wound around itself, primed to snap as it did one fateful day as a child in the back of a bus when he nearly beat another boy half to death over the life of his pet turtle, Manitou. In that sense, there’s an argument to be made that Wild Fell is equally about psychological disturbances as it is supernatural ones.
Before going any further, I must warn readers that the rest of this review will dive fairly heavily into spoilers as I try to unravel the book’s ending. Should you wish to cut yourself off now and actually read it for yourself, know that I wholeheartedly recommend this book—Rowe’s seemingly small and intimate ghost story is an unsettling delight from start to finish.
For those of you still with me, here we go.
I’m not entirely sure what I trust regarding certain late-novel revelations, specifically those involving Jameson’s father and the possibility of molestation. There are layers of misdirection at work in Wild Fell, be they from sincere psychological unrest brought on by Amanda’s presence or by the burying and subsequent unearthing of past trauma. I know at first I was utterly indignant towards the possibility that Jameson’s father, who’d been so lovingly crafted as a paragon of kind and proper parenting, could be such a terror. I’d grown so unexpectedly attached to what the elder Browning represented that any subversion of that image felt… Well, it felt like an attack. To that I say kudos—because I wouldn’t have felt so wounded had he not been so expertly designed to begin with.
I want to say that I believe Amanda was lying in an attempt to draw another lonely soul to Blackmore Island to keep for herself, but two things keep me wondering just how much of the novel was actually a ghost story and how much of it was endemic of one man’s psychological break. The first is the breadth of the glamour cast over Jameson’s sight: not only does he not see what Wild Fell truly looks like, but his vision of the travel agency in its original state, and the resurrection of Velnette Fowler, point to something greater—to either psychological misdirection or possession of a sort, where Amanda is so tightly linked to his mind and soul that he sees only the memories and images she wants him to see. The second possibility is revealed in a small, seemingly innocuous section of dialogue on page 31:
We had no secrets from each other, except for the one I kept: I never told Hank about Amanda, the little girl who lived in my mirror, the little girl who had my face and spoke in my voice, but who was someone else entirely.
Amanda makes her first appearance prior to the night that Jameson’s father spends in bed comforting his son—the same scene later perverted by Amanda, recounting to the adult Jameson the things he (possibly) buried in order to maintain his sanity. This to me indicates two divergent possibilities: that either Amanda was conjured by Jameson’s mind as a response to previous molestation, and her supernatural capabilities for vengeance are in fact intended to reflect the hatred Jameson feels but refuses to acknowledge toward his father; or that Amanda sees the closeness between Jameson and his father and decides the only way to bring Jameson over, eventually, to her reality is to distort his own with lies and misdirection aimed at destroying the only positive familial relationship he has. In the former, Amanda is a defense mechanism through which Jameson has learned to cope; in the latter, she’s little more than a vengeful spirit re-experiencing the hatred she felt toward her own sexually abusive father by twisting Jameson’s view of his.
That these possibilities are to me equally viable is an example of Wild Fell’s strengths. This novel is a layered, expertly crafted piece of entertainment, and so much more than just another ghost story.
Well-written ghost stories are aesthetic experiences, and Wild Fell was one of the finest. It defied traditional trappings of the gothic genre however, exploring some interesting questions of gender ideals, gender fluidity and repressed trauma.
Three stars instead of two for sheer, dumb pageturnery.
Summary, all of which is a spoiler:
This oddly-paced tale starts off with a summer horror movie prologue: two teens go to a remote beach at night, decide to have sex, and promptly die in terrible ways. Jump forward ten years and meet our protagonist as a child. One Jameson Browning -- whose mother is the very picture of bad parenting and whose father is the very picture of perfect parenting (or is he?!) -- is a lonely boy who talks to his reflection in the mirror. One day, his reflection...TALKS BACK TO HIM!! Then she (that's right, his reflection is a girl!) starts killing people, at first in Jameson's service and then just sort of uncontrollably, so he has to smash the mirror to stop her for once and for all (or will it?!). Jump forward to present day: Jameson's mother left long ago and his beloved father is in the process of leaving him, so to speak, via Alzheimer's. Thanks to a settlement from a dreadful accident which leaves Jameson unable to continue his career as a teacher, he purchases the notorious island mansion WILD FELL, sight unseen. Things are looking up, but why are there all these moths fluttering around? Why won't his cell phone ring through to Toronto? And why are there mirrors in every room? And why does his real estate agent have a FREAKING STONE IN THE LOCAL CEMETERY?!? I mean, is she dead, or what!?
Yes, Jameson Browning thought he knew horror, but the fears and troubles of his past are mere child's play compared to the one terrible night he spends in...WILD FELL! (*thunder crash*)
Back to the oddly-paced thing (much like this review): for being a story about a haunted house, the actual house isn't seen until the last fourth or so of the book, and the actual scary stuff (the point where you go, "Whoa, hold up! This can't be explained away by any natural phenomenon. Get out of there, grrrl!") doesn't start until the last 20 or so pages! It's very odd.
All that being said, and despite some silliness which occurs mostly at the end, and some eye-rolling writing, which only pops up now and then, this was fun to read. A nice, chilling quick read that will probably keep me from making eye contact with myself in the bathroom mirror when I get up to go pee in the middle of the night. Fear is such a powerful and easily transmittable emotion -- I guess that's why we're a little more forgiving of structural deficiencies in our horror books and films.
(Ultimate Spoiler, for People Who Don't Want to Read the Book but Whose Interest Has Been Mildly Peaked:
Jamie Browning wants to get away from it all - a divorce, an accident and a father suffering from Alzheimer's disease. An insurance windfall allows him to purchase Blackmore Island and its Victorian Gothic residence, Wild Fell. The property is a dream come true or a nightmare come true. Vengeful ghosts await. They have always waited.
I enjoyed this ghost story. There is a strong weave of sense of place, time, and character throughout the novel.
The prologue alone paints images like a prose version of a Tragically Hip song. The small summer lake town Alvina, Ontario, Canada pops off the pages, complete with tragedy and haunting.
The heart of the story centers on Jamie, who relates his childhood experiences with an imaginary friend named Amanda who inhabits a mirror in his room. But, perhaps, Amanda is not all that imaginary, as she seems to have a evil influence beyond the confines of her mirror.
As Jamie relates his adult life, Amanda is forgotten and real life trials intervene, until Jamie finds that he is inexorably drawn to Wild Fell.
The climax ratchets to a fever pitch as the revelations are exposed, furiously propelling the story to its conclusion.
Wild Fell does its job as a ghost and haunted house story. It drips with mood, atmosphere, chills, and a few surprises and twists along the way. Recommended.
Wild Fell begins in the small town of Alvina, Ontario, in 1960, when Sean Schwartz asks his high school sweetheart, Brenda Egan, if she believes in ghosts. Whether he’s trying to scare her into cuddling closer, looking for some excitement to end the summer before school begins again, or is entirely sincere in his question, his question is a prelude to asking Brenda if she’ll cross a mile of Devil’s Lake to Blackmore Island to explore the remains of a mansion called Wild Fell. It takes some persuading, but Brenda reluctantly agrees, only to change her mind when they’re halfway there, suddenly frightened. Sean is disappointed, maybe angry, but the evening is saved by an illicit bottle of wine and a bonfire. But Wild Fell isn’t done with them, and the curtain of the prologue falls as a legend begins.
Michael Rowe sets his hook firmly with this prologue, but then he lets the line ... Read More: