Don't miss
"The Wild Hunt" by Emma Seckel; Tin House (360 pages, $16.95)
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"All those boys" have disappeared from the small Scottish island that is the setting for Emma Seckel's "The Wild Hunt." It's several years after the end of World War II, and the absence of the young men who never returned hangs over the island like a cloud. Or, more accurately, like the sluagh (pronounced "sloo-ah") — thousands of crows that visited each fall while migrating.
Leigh Wells has returned to the island after four years away. She is warned by her old friends and neighbors that, since the war, the sluagh has become more aggressive, with stories told of destroyed houses and farm animals carried off into the air to become the crows' food. It is as if the crows have arrived as malevolent spirits who torment those who sacrificed their children in the days of jingoistic fervor.
Hugo was a child during the war, but he is no less haunted. "Hugo watched the crows and thought of his brother in the air — and then the loss of flight, careening to earth in a burst of flames. It seemed unfair, he thought, that so much feeling should come from the absence of a person he hardly remembered at all. Or perhaps the unfairness was the feeling. The grief of things unknown." Absence takes on protean solidity for those left behind.
Seckel braids together ancient Celtic and Norse folklore to explore the mass trauma left in the war's wake. What results is a gorgeous chorus of character voices conducted by Seckel along with sensory-rich prose that captures the rich details of island life. And death.
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Lorraine Berry is a critic in Oregon.
