The Wild Hunt
On a remote Scottish island in 1949, Iain MacTavish and Leigh Welles have returned for different but equally tragic reasons. Iain has survived his service as a Royal Air Force fighter pilot with his sanity only barely intact; Leigh has returned to bury her father, after failing to make a life in the big city (Edinburgh). It’s October, which the locals know as the time of the sluagh – menacing spirits who escort lost souls from this world to the next. On the unnamed island (from the author’s hints, it seems to be located somewhere in the Orkneys), the sluagh take the form of dark, crow-like birds who flock in their thousands to the moors and crags, perching in threes wherever one looks, menacing the living human population with a constant reminder of loss and the thinness of the veil between the dead and the living. Because World War II has cut so many souls prematurely and traumatically adrift, the usual anxiety of the season is heightened unbearably; even worse, young Hugo McClare this year has desecrated the islanders’ annual ritual of protection from haunting by killing one of the hated birds.
Leigh and Iain join forces to search for Hugo, gone missing after his terrible act, and in the process realize that something even worse than the sluagh stalks the island. Seckel painstakingly reveals the islanders’ secrets one by one, as we experience this worst of all Octobers from the point of view of various characters (but mostly Iain and Leigh). Although the subject matter is painful, the prose is so lyrical and tender that the tone is never oppressive. Seckel’s descriptions of the landscape’s wild beauty, and her affection for its inhabitants, are so vivid that the reader empathizes easily with Leigh’s fierce determination to save her home.
