Catriona Ward writes transportive fiction that, regardless of setting, always feels like a peek into some other world. It’s a relatable world, to be sure, but the grace of Ward’s prose and the raw emotional power of her narratives always create the sense that we’re looking through some dark glass at something just beyond our grasp, yet within our understanding. It’s entrancing, and it continues with her latest novel.
Set in Colorado, Nowhere Burning is part folk horror, part Lord of the Flies, part dissection of an evolving legacy of darkness tied to one mountain hideaway. Like Ward’s previous novel, Looking Glass Sound, it’s a book about how places have memory as much as people do, how the mythology of a place can transform the people who encounter it, and how survival often hinges on embracing our darkest impulses as well as our innate good.
The “Nowhere” of the title is a mysterious estate lodged in the Rocky Mountains that was, until a few years ago, home to a movie star, Leaf Winham. Winham was known for his eccentricities, including some that verged into grim territory, but whatever he was doing in his mountain hideaway ended the day that Nowhere went up in flames. Or did it?
Now, Nowhere is an autonomous community of child runaways who steer clear of Winham’s charcoal shell of a home but embrace the rest of the estate as their own. The presence of the children and the insular world they’ve built for themselves has only added to Nowhere’s mystique, and as Ward’s novel begins, it draws everyone from a pair of siblings seeking to escape a rough home life to a pair of documentarians trying to understand the phenomenon of this strange community in the mountains. As both children and filmmakers converge on Nowhere, secrets come to light, perceptions shift, and the darkness lurking in the place grows much bigger and stranger than Leaf Winham himself.
As she did with the coastal locales of Looking Glass Sound, Ward roots Nowhere Burning in something we can all picture. Even if you’ve never been to Colorado, you can imagine the title location, a husk of a celebrity’s playground looming over these children like Stephen King’s Overlook Hotel. There’s an immense beauty to it, something Ward’s young protagonist, Riley, immediately recognizes when she steps onto the grounds. From the wild carrots growing in the meadows to the streams where a former pet crocodile still lurks, there is an immediate sense of immersion in the place, along with a feeling that you’re slipping into some kind of Neverland.
But while Peter Pan and Lord of the Flies are no doubt influences on the story, Ward is not content to rest within the familiar tropes of those stories. These are just the beginnings of her act of narrative conjuration, the familiar scaffolding on which she can hang a dark tale that expands like a dark web waiting to ensnare us all.
There is a mythology and a reason behind everything that’s happening at Nowhere, and a reason why each of these disparate characters is drawn to the place. Ward explores these reasons through flashbacks, quiet moments of character building, and direct confrontation with the estate’s wild darkness, but she never stops to simply spell it all out for the reader in a single expository framework. She doesn’t need to. Catriona Ward’s novels are vivid and grand, yes, but they’re also remarkably nimble and subtle. Her style allows you to understand and believe the feeling behind a story long before you’ve got the whole plot, which makes her fans particularly devoted.
It’s not about predicting the next scare, but losing yourself completely in the narrative until, when a scare does come, it’s a spike in the ambient hum of dread she’s already laid in and set to pumping like blood. Her stories feel alive in ways few other horror novelists can achieve, and Nowhere Burning is yet more proof of that gift.
It’s also, I think, a wonderful entry point for new Catriona Ward readers. Nowhere Burning has roots in the familiar, the eccentric, the things we can all picture dotting the landscape of our minds. It’s a book with a remarkable hook, but what gives it staying power is Ward’s refusal to tell this story any way but her own. It’s a remarkable achievement and a spellbinding experience.
Nowhere Burning is available February 24 wherever books are sold.
