Synopsis
Girl in the Creek is a pulse-pounding story about the horrors growing all around us, perfect for fans of Jeff VanderMeer and T. Kingfisher.
Buried secrets only spread.
Erin’s brother Bryan has been missing for five years.
It was as if he simply walked into the forests of the Pacific Northwest and vanished. Determined to uncover the truth, Erin heads to the foothills of Mt. Hood where Bryan was last seen alive. He isn’t the first hiker to go missing in this area, and their cases go unsolved.
When she discovers the corpse of a local woman in a creek, Erin unknowingly puts herself in the crosshairs of very powerful forces—from this world and beyond—hell-bent on keeping their secrets buried.
Review
At the heart of most fungal horror works is the theme of connectedness. That, and gore. Lots and lots of gore, if we’re lucky. Hugo award-winner and editor of Nightmare Magazine, Wendy N. Wagner doesn’t skimp on either in her sporror book, Girl in the Creek.
Travel writer and podcaster Erin Harper has travelled to Faraday, OR with her showrunner and co-host, Hari, and their small crew. They’ve arrived on a newspaper’s dime so she can write about how the poor, blue-collar river and mining town is being revitalized as the next hot vacation spot. What she’s really there for is to learn about her brother’s disappearance in Faraday years earlier. Faraday has become a hotspot not just for a lowkey vacay, but for missing people. Flyers of the lost decorate the town, and soon enough Erin stumbles upon the body of a girl who had disappeared prior to her arrival – our titular girl in the creek, Elena Lopez. She’s been dead for a while, but that doesn’t stop her from disappearing from the morgue, or from her fingerprints to turn up at a crime scene after.
Of course, at the heart of it all, is an alien network of spores, molds, and fungus. Girl in the Creek lies somewhere between the classic Creepshow segment “The Lonesome Death of Jordy Verrill” and The Thing, with a small dash of pseudo-zombie mayhem and a smidge of Twin Peaks’s small-town-with-big-secrets for good measure. Wagner gets her ick on as the book moves quickly toward its conclusion, amping up the body horror to terrific effect with plenty of dried out, decaying, sloughing body parts (one particularly squelchy scene late in the book involves an infected dog). It’s hard not to picture Faraday in hindsight as some mold covered town with all manner of mushrooms fruiting from the sides of its buildings and its inhabitants. Everything just feels moist and rotten.
While the gore certainly helped hold my attention, it was ultimately Erin herself that truly kept me invested. Her burgeoning relationship with Madison, sister to one their guides through Faraday, was adorable and I couldn’t help but root for them to make it through, especially given Wagner’s propensity for upping the body count so routinely and regularly it might make George R.R. Martin blush.
Faraday itself feels properly lived in. Wagner brings in some local color with an ex-cop turned mushroom forager and the elderly B&B runner who has had her fingers in much of Faraday’s economic history. Wagner does a terrific job painting the scene for us, with Faraday surrounded by forest. One segment in the book’s opening chapter presents such a vivid picture of Oregon greenery that I couldn’t help but feel like I was there. That Wagner uses this moment to double as some rich character development to illustrate Erin’s connection with her lost brother, and his love of nature, is a stunner that really clues you into Wagner’s capabilities as a storyteller.
Then, of course, there’s the 1907 meteor strike, the biggest thing to ever happen to Faraday, or so we’re told. I’d be inclined to believe it, too, if it weren’t for the people and wildlife possessed by mushrooms. Known to itself as The Strangeness (I guess if you’re an alien fungus with enough sapience to name yourself, it’s better to call yourself The Strangeness instead of Bob or Jimmy. That, or The Strangeness is emo. Either way, it’s pretty accurate – it is pretty damn strange.), this highly connected alien network has infected the forests surrounding Faraday and incorporated various animals into its being. It watches over Faraday through the eyes of birds and deer, always seeking ways to expand and grow and consume. When its spores begin to take root in the body of the girl in the creek… well, let’s just say that’s when shit gets real. The network itself, binding the fungus to the Earth and the creatures and people it inhabits, is another highpoint in the narrative. When Wagner takes us inside it, we’re given such an intense picture of sensory overload and appalling chaos, but also a limitless vista of wonder and promise. It’s beautiful and horrific. One can’t help but wonder amidst this madness if the disconnectedness of individuality is better or worse given the promises and consequences of it all.
Of course, for The Strangeness, that sense of individuality, of differentiation, is itself a threat. When it infects Elena’s corpse, something funkier than usual happens and Elena becomes a rogue agent that must be stopped. The how and why of it all was a little too hand-wavy for my liking, even as Wagner ties it into some larger story threads involving trauma, abduction, and sexual assault. I didn’t quite buy into The Strangeness and Elena serving cross-purposes and wish there had been a bit more meat on this conflict.
Girl in the Creek has just a few too many parallel threats enjoining Erin’s attempt to find her brother, but none feel as fully fleshed out as they could be. On the whole, though, Wagner’s latest cli-fi offering ticks enough boxes to satisfy, and certainly has its share of memorable and disquieting moments. Wagner herself is one hell of a writer, and she can do a heck of a lot in only a few words. Perhaps the highest compliment I can pay Girl in the Creek is that it made me want to check out the rest of her works, which given my backlog of books to read is no small feat indeed.
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