The Wild Hunt

A young man’s disappearance rouses old superstitions in Seckel’s intoxicating and atmospheric debut. Several years after the end of WWII, the death of Leigh Welles’s father brings her back to the Scottish island she grew up on and leaves her feeling unmoored ahead of the arrival of the “sluagh,” a flock of supposedly haunted crows that menace the island each October when “the border between this world and the next” is believed to be most porous. Rumored to “carry the dead’s souls,” the birds have been growing more aggressive, killing farm animals and attacking a schoolgirl, since the war took the lives of many of the island’s young men. When Leigh’s family friend Hugo vanishes after the annual festival to scare away the sluagh, the locals suspect the birds of evildoing and take Hugo for dead after a thorough search of the small island comes up empty. Unwilling to give up so easily, Leigh joins forces with Iain MacTavish, a war hero and widower, to find Hugo, in the process uncovering forces stranger than either had imagined. Seckel’s descriptions evocatively conjure the roiling dread that permeates the island (“The sluagh had grown so numerous that their once elegant ballets in the air had blacked out the sky. Great unnatural clouds”), underscoring the elegiac reflections on grief and the toll of war. This moody meditation delivers. Agent: Catherine Drayton and Claire Friedman, InkWell Management. (Aug.)