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
Loved the cover immediately, so I am so thankful I was chosen as an arc reader. Thank you to Tor Nightfire for the physical copy.
Eco horror is on the rise, and the spores and fungus, the sporror, will come for us all! Us a FanFiAddict actually do a lot of talk about all things fungus, especially with Adrian M. Gibson’s debut of Mushroom Blues, and A.J. Calvin being a certified scientist-badass, we are a bunch of fun-gals and fun-guys. So I know several of us were eager to get our hands on this.
The author does a solid job with laying the scene. It’s slow, as it is the real world. People may go missing, but nothing supernatural happens here. That, and we may need a tad of atmosphere to built up. I enjoyed the idea of Erin Harper heading for a little work away from work. She tells her boss there’s a new hotspot on the rise, one they must cover before someone else does, but truly she wants to turn her journalistic feelers out for her photographer and friend, Hari’s podcast. When too many disappearances for one town come to light, could her brother possibly have been lost out there too?
I was a tad shaky on the followup, the build, and the climax. On the one hand, don’t we all love determination, perseverance, and overcoming odds? On the other, I found myself wondering why THESE characters were pushing so hard for this. Erin has her brother to think about, but their qualifications otherwise are that they are hikers? When one character said no and left, I was like hello, sensibility! But in all seriousness, when fungus hiveminds become real, you protect the townspeople.
The owner of the Airbnb Erin stays at really came to mind to me like Lisa Emery’s portrayal of The Dama in The Walking Dead: Dead City. All high collared and mighty, but then ready to get her hands dirty. And while at first I wasn’t loving the hivemind mushroom-fugue-state chapters, they grew on me more and more and the reaching mycelium or hyphae brought to mind that first runner you see at the neighbor’s house in HBOs The Last of Us…which is just chef’s kiss spooky stuff.
This is a good story and it’s not overly long. It’ll grip your attention and you can easily rip through it…if you can handle the rot, decay, water logged skin, and eerie, creeping mushrooms.
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