Wendy N. Wagner
Girl in the Creek
Tor Nightfire, 2025
In this eco-horror thriller, a young woman, Erin Harper, travels to the rural Oregon town of Faraday, ostensibly on assignment to do a travel story. But she soon meets up with a group of her friends and some locals to explore the woods and investigate one in a long line of missing person cases. Erin is a twenty-something who wants to be a serious journalist, and her closest friend Hari is doing a podcast focused on missing BIPOC women. Two hot locals are lifelong friends, and provide a sort of rural attraction for the tourists in the group, as well as being helpful guides through the forest and the dark history of Faraday. There are others in the group as well, but the depth of characterization wasn’t enough for me to keep them apart. In contrast, the setting of the deep Pacific Northwest forest in the foothills of Mount Hood, Oregon, is depicted skillfully and becomes perhaps the most memorable character in the novel.
In a far too common trope, the novel starts with a nameless, naked body of a young woman who has been left to die. A coyote drags her body into a nearby creek where she is soon inhabited by a strange force. Later we learn that this young woman has a name: Elena Lopez. She was a waitress at the local brewery and has been reported missing. As she floats in the creek, her body becomes possessed by a strange force and, in a state neither dead nor alive, she begins to wreak vengeance on those who harmed her. While this was perhaps the most compelling plot line in the novel, she has very few scenes and (spoiler) comes to a terrible second ending. This read to me as both casual tokenism and a failed opportunity in the midst of a fairly pedestrian novel.
Faraday, Oregon is a town with a history of logging, mining, and other climate abuse. The aging town matriarch, Olivia Vanderpoel, who owns the B&B where Erin is staying, is descended from the town’s wealthiest family who made their money in the industries whose remains are polluting the forest. Olivia is still grieving her son, Scott, who disappeared into the woods a decade earlier. We learn that Erin is also grieving—her only brother Bryan disappeared into these same woods some five years before. Both women are convinced their loved ones are still alive, and this becomes a touchstone between them. Their shared grief gestures toward a deeper emotional current in the novel, but the forward drive of the action overtakes this more delicate plot line.