The Wild Hunt

May 23, 2022
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.

August 15, 2022
Scottish islanders are haunted by repressed memories of sons recently lost in World War II, while a flock of birds grows ever more powerful. When Leigh Welles gets the phone call that her father has been in a fatal accident, she returns to her Scottish island home from the mainland. Leigh's homecoming coincides with the annual Oct. 1 return of the crows, who always fly in threes and whom the locals call sluagh--harbingers of death: "They come every October....They look like crows but they carry the dead's souls." On the night of a local ritual where town elders present offerings of earth to a bonfire, Hugo McClare grabs one of the sluagh and kills it, much to the horror of the onlookers. That same night, Hugo goes missing. Leigh and Iain MacTavish, a young widower and World War II fighter pilot, desperately search for Hugo long after everyone else has given up. All the while the pair are battling their own demons. Leigh is plagued by memories of her absentee mother and struggles with her tenuous relationship with her brother who lives on the mainland. Iain is drowning under the weight of the guilt of being one of the only local boys to come home from the war when so many did not, including Hugo's older brother, Matthew. As the crows become increasingly threatening and destructive, Hugo's enigmatic disappearance brings a host of new questions as well as tender moments of connection. Treading deftly into the worlds of folklore and magical realism, Seckel keenly captures a tone that echoes the eerie moor scenery of the island: hazy, haunting, and teeming with misgivings. A foreboding mystery with surprising glimmers of hope.

COPYRIGHT(2022) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

July 15, 2022
Leigh lives on the Scottish mainland but is drawn to her childhood home, a rugged island off the coast of Scotland, filled with the wildness of the moors, the water, and her family farm. Of the others her age who also left, most joined the war effort and never returned. Her savings dwindling, Leigh receives notice of her father's death, which prompts the return home she was afraid to admit she always longed for. But WWII has taken its toll, and the island of her youth, with its lively festivals and ancient beliefs in wayward spirits, has changed. The Celtic legends of the sluagh, crow-like creatures, have become filled with grief and despair. As Leigh tries to resume life on the island and move on from her father's death and the ghosts of her past, she is determined to unearth the true meaning behind the ever-present sluagh, but instead finds herself in grave danger. In her debut, writer and photographer Seckel offers a haunting love story full of mystery and beauty.

COPYRIGHT(2022) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.