Lisa Donnan is a tour guide working at Ireland's largest environmental reclamation project—a 400 sq. km. bog that was nearly wiped out by peat extraction and is now being allowed to regrow. She and her coworkers oversee the re-wilding of what is now a nature park by tracking wildlife, monitoring biosystems, and leading tours and hikes. Trouble starts when one of the farmers allowed to use the land discovers an eviscerated cow. The discovery coincides with the first day of hiking for a group of middle-schoolers, and Lisa soon finds her hands full with more than just teen angst.
If that intro sounds too simplistic, too easy, it isn't. Yes, McDonald's m.o. has been layered novels. Even his Everness YA series had complexity in plot and setting. Not The Wilding. What you see is what you get. In the vein of Preston and Child, as well as Michael Crichton and others, the novel is straightforward monster horror. It ebbs and flows with the standard tropes—eerie noises, sudden disappearances, characters finding themselves separated from the group, jump scares, mysterious NPCs, yadda, yadda. I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop, and it didn't.
I look to McDonald to deliver dynamic prose, and The Wilding does not disappoint. The challenge is, the prose does not always complement story. It's patchy, it's flighty, it's high and low, and ultimately, it's too dynamic for the mainstream horror story McDonald is aiming at. It needed a couple more edits to rein in the ebbs and create more standard flows—standard flows for standard horror.
A side comment. Over the years McDonald has looked to fill genre slots in his oeuvre. As mentioned, there is the Everness YA sf series, but there is also the romance of Time Was, the magic realism(-ish) of Desolation Road and Ares Express, the cyberpunk of River of Gods, the historical fiction of Brasyl, the space opera of the Luna series, the nanotech of The Dervish House, the aliens of Sacrifice of Fools, the faery of King of Morning, King of Day, the eco-sf of Hopeland, and... whatever the fuck Out on Blue Six is. The Wilding fills the bestseller horror slot. Fair enough.
When reading a novel I often look online what others are saying, a pulse check. With The Wilding, I encountered a large amount of positivity, positivity that didn't align with the book I was reading. Gary K. Wolfe's thoughts in particular stick out. “...The Wilding is simply the tale, told with a beauty and grace that sometimes echoes that of Lisa’s beloved Yeats, of a single skirmish in a universal contest.” Really? I don't think McDonald himself would use that shade of purple. It's such hyperbole that makes me question contemporary reviews, not to mention how deep in the culture of Locus an aversion to proper criticism goes.
In the end, The Wilding should appear on the radar of readers who enjoy bestseller horror. McDonald had a mold to fill, and he fills it in perfunctory, contemporary fashion. The Irish bog and the faery-esque / druid-esque nature of the story's fantastical elements add flavor, but stereotypes fill the bulk of the meal. My radar says it's the cheap version of Jeff VanderMeer's Annihilation or Robert Holdstock's Mythago Wood. Both those novels do a similar weird/horror vibe significantly better, not to mention add existential complexity. McDonald's prose, while still better than most writers, feels slap-dash, off-the-cuff, in need of a couple more edits. Overall, meh.
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