Nowhere Burning

55 pages in and all the little hooks have set. The desperate runaways, the pair of film makers hunting down an urban legend about runaway kids living at the abandoned ranch of a dead (??) movie star and serial killer, a victim of those kids who escaped and reports having been bled daily for 3 weeks and fed baby formula, a man who almost became that serial killer's victim, but is now taking the YouTubers up to the ranch to confront his past and the Nowhere kids. Did the runaway kids save the killer and are now in some kind of thrall to him or is he also part of the legend? So tasty.

Another book of hers that’s basically impossible to categorize. It’s part fantasy, part gothic, part horror, part thriller and, believe it or not, part show more romance. If you’re familiar with Ward’s work, you’ll know that her plotting is layered and everything connects. Expect to cringe a lot and be almost overwhelmed with information, intrigue and inexplicable things. This very long review is basically all spoilers and functions to remind myself of the book more than it is to critique, although there is a bit of that.

Notes while reading -

* Is Cousin poisoned? Dead?
* Marc & Kimble (ugh) YouTubers?
* The timeline is really difficult to parse - seems like Riley and Oliver were in the present, but then it only seemed like M&K were. There are no dates or any indications of how close the different timelines are. Another way to keep the reader muddled.
* Ward has a thing for isolation and the weird ideas it feeds. Also cults and crazy kids - like Children of the Corn or the feral kids in Thunderdome. So what happens to them as they grow up? There are no adults in Nowhere. Uncontrollable children plain scare us, as do serial killers who can’t die. Nice combo. Intriguing as is Marc’s missing leg and mysterious background. And Linus, the almost Leaf Winham victim - at least he starts out that way, but fades and becomes unimportant other than for a specific task. Hm. I kind of hate when authors do that..
63 - Bear trap got Marc’s leg?
87 - Adam’s story - an architect burning down a house? Did he build it?
94 - This whole encounter is bonkers. Who talks like this?
101 - A croc in Colorado? Uh, no. How do the kids know its name?
133 - M&K’s handsignals are very weird.
137 - Rock note over cliff into valley? WTF?
164 - NOW the conversation feels surreal?
Noon = certifiable. Blood on the land? Seems to revive things, but that’s nutty.
176 - Forgive M for what? Cancelling her vacation? Weird. Also their conversations are so hard to follow - it’s like there is some kind of ESP involved.
193 - Growing up is a demon - why this repetition from Cousin’s brainwashing?
214 - Why didn’t I connect Adam’s pregnant girlfriend w/Riley’s mom? Duh. I think it was the lack of a definitive timeline.
240 - The corpse routine is depraved.
261 - Is Marc Oliver? Gangrene (yes)

I liked the mushroom-induced hallucinations. No wonder they all thought Leaf was alive. During her capture & torture, Riley and Noon share a hallucination about the children, they both see and remark on their presence in the room, and Leaf’s.

Great work keeping my head spinning so much that I also failed to connect Oliver to Marc as it was pretty obvious that his leg wound wouldn’t get better. The other repercussions of that wouldn’t stay at bay either and I knew at some point Cal would find Danny’s body and all the evidence Riley left behind. Exactly how they got Oliver to side with them so fast and to give her up was pretty astounding. No wonder he became such a screwed up person. It would have been so much worse if he had stayed in the system instead of being adopted by a good family.

The situation he and Riley escaped was a kind of familiar theme with Ward - the evil adult, deluded and corrupt. There’s a hint of religious mania again and indoctrination tactics. Cousin’s relentless physical attempts to drive out the demon or keep it at bay nearly killed Oliver outright and it was painful to read. I basically couldn’t wait for them to escape and make a better life, but be careful what you wish for. As much as Riley tried to do for them, she couldn't overcome the iron fist in the velvet glove conditions at Nowhere. They had a very tight bond and it was a heartbreak to see it erode and break.

But there are still unanswered questions such as what happened to the kids as they grew up. Noon kept ranting about the current residents not really being the children of Nowhere, but that they cared for them. Those children being the five murdered and buried in the cellar. The bones were dug up and made into fetishes that she said they would recognize if they saw someone wearing one. Where would they see that? She was a nut and probably took too much of those mushrooms herself. The story of the tribal war in the early days was chilling (Lord of the Flies) and Noon’s rise to the top and punishments (Cal and Danny’s missing fingers). I think it has to be deliberate to leave this much information hanging or just at the edges so we have to imagine and fill in ourselves. Were they fed in total to the land in the end? Willing sacrifices?. Oh and how did the kids know the crocodile was called Tinkerbell? I couldn’t find out how. Just another thing to make us think Leaf was still alive? Unsettling as hell.

As was the relationship between Adam and Leaf. OMG what a fucked up pair they were. Of course one more than the other, but still Creepy. Yeah, with a capital C. Not only was that part of what was so hard to understand, but so was the physicality of the valley and the house itself. Very hard to imagine. The valley itself was so perilously placed that it was that easy to lock off and trap everyone in or out. More of a canyon than a valley and thinking of it that way made it easier to believe it could be locked off. The house seemed not to have a normal layout and the multiple blue prints Adam turned to in the end, seems to have borne that out. All the sinister spy holes and Leaf’s secret hideaway. The way that was revealed in snippets was the literary equivalent of the type of film editing made popular by Se7en - lighting cuts, flashing lights, odd color toning - just enough to feed your imagination and make you paint the worst. Adam’s refrain that Leaf was eating him up and eventually there would be nothing left was also really on point and terrible. Leaf would repeat Adam’s words like your five-year-old-brother, he would adopt his gestures and mannerisms, eventually he wore Adam’s expressions and emotions like a mask. The old clothes in the closet (not a wardrobe, Catriona, but I’ll get to that later on) were a really big red flag that Adam should have heeded. The actor’s extreme mood swings and disappearances were nutty and I never did see what was so attractive about him. The whole thing was fatalistic and seemed like the punishment Adam so wanted.

The third relationship was Marc and Kimble and I really couldn’t get a handle on that one. All the secret handshakes and gestures, the near ESP connection that made their conversation really hard to follow was difficult to deal with, but effective in keeping the reader off balance and confused. Like so much of the other relationships and situations, this one felt like it couldn’t actually exist, as if these two people were part alien.

There were two interludes that filled in some parts and one was the story of the children and their mother killed by their father and then covered up by the town. I would have liked the repercussions of that to be clearer when it came to Leaf building up there and the kids all invading and making it their feral kid kingdom. It felt tacked on which isn’t something I have experienced with Ward’s books before. The other was the story of the Lilac Boy and bringing him down off the mountain. I actually read it a couple times looking for signs it was Oliver, but the kid could walk pretty well and that didn’t jibe with his condition from the other part. Still, it was him. The lilac is the door indeed.

In the end, the storm and flood that destroyed the valley and Nowhere once and for all was a nice counterpoint to the fire motif woven through most of it, although I have a hard time believing in its ferocity and the fact that everyone who was supposed to survive did.

The ending is more upbeat than I thought it could manage. Not happy exactly, but leaning that way. Marc gets his daughter back, Kimble gets Margot back, Riley gets her freedom back and Linus…well he sort of faded out of the story much earlier and so I don’t really know why we needed him other than to lead them to the end of the tunnel that was outside of the valley. The saddest part is Riley herself and what she’ll do now. 30 years of living in that disaster zone of a house with the horrors of her past and present and she just spirits away in the night. Where will she go and what will she do? It isn’t entirely sad, more mysterious and full of dark possibilities.

Ok so about some of the language and spelling, I was thoroughly annoyed at the Britishisms sprinkled throughout. The book is set in Colorado. That's the United States the last time I checked, and people don't say the lightbulb was hanging by a piece of flex, we say wire or electrical cord. We don't say we live on a close (as I do), we say we live on a dead end road or maybe a cul-de-sac.. We don't change a tyre, it's a tire. I have a two story house, not a two storey house. We don't cut mould off cheese, it's mold. We don't smoulder, we smolder. Here a wardrobe is a set of clothing or costumes and it goes in a CLOSET. Ugh. SO irritating. She is a much-traveled writer, but born in the US and lives in England I believe, but dammit, an editor should have caught this if she didn't herself. I caught these gaffes every time and it pulled me out of the story with a hard yank (see what I did there?). show less

This is a horrific mystery thriller. It’s an unsettling dark mashup of Peter Pan and Lord of the Flies. There were three timelines and casts of characters to follow, but it never felt too expansive or challenging. The pacing is excellent. It picks up almost immediately and was hard to step away from once the plot got going. As usual with horror, the characters make so many decisions I was screaming at them not to. Much of the plot unfolds through the eyes of people on mushrooms, which makes it genuinely difficult to know what's real. It's creepy, gruesome, and features a heavy dose of child abuse, neglect, and murder, so be prepared. The writing is vivid enough that I could easily imagine this on screen, but I wasn't too surprised by show more the reveals. Creepy book, enjoyable read.

Thanks to NetGalley and Tor Nightfire for access to this book. show less

Ward is one of those authors you can trust. This has alternating points of view and a disjointed timeline, but trust her--she brings it all together at the end, and I loved the payoff. This book ticks so many of my boxes: isolated location, weird cult, creepy kids, hauntings, ambiguity about what is real, unforeseen twist. I really liked it.

The pacing is fantastic! I burned through this book. The multiple POVs make the story flow nicely. The book's jacket describes it as a mix between Peter Pan and Lord of the Flies; a perfect description! The Peter Pan references were lovely. As always, Catriona's antihero character is lovable despite their horrors/horrible acts. I would describe the setting as a character as well, which is such a cool thing to say about a story!

There are several horror novels set to be published in 2026 that were influenced by Peter Pan. This is one of them. This is my second time reading a book by Catriona Ward. I didn’t like “Nowhere Burning” as much as “Sundial,” but overall, I thought it was a good book.Both novels are a slow burn. There are multiple POV‘s and timelines, the connection between all of which are explained in the end. Some may find this a difficult read due to the subject matter of childhood abuse and neglect.

Thank you to MacMillan Audio and NetGalley for providing me with an audiobook version of this ARC. The following thoughts are entirely my own.

This one took a while to build, but it was worth the wait as all the stories came together and the role of all the characters came to light. The narrators were both great and really cold the story.

I don't think this my favorite by the author (I still think The Last House on Needless Street) but this one was still so good.