Nowhere Burning A Dark Tale of Family, Friendship, and Survival by Catriona Ward

 Nowhere Burning by Catriona Ward

Nowhere Burning book cover

Author and master storyteller Catriona Ward

Big thanks to Tor Publishing and NetGalley for sharing an advanced copy of Catriona Ward’s dazzling new novel Nowhere Burning. I previously read and was stunned by Sundial, and last year, I read the Shivers Collection, in which her story “Night and Day in Misery” stood out to me as the best story in the collection. I had high expectations for this book, and Ward does not disappoint. Nowhere Burning is a compelling and propulsive novel that deals with families, friendships, and fidelity. In fact, there were elements of the story that reminded me of some of the best parts of Sundial. Needless to say, as one of the best horror and thriller writers I’ve read in the past few years, Ward has created a dark story about death and rebirth that also features a clan of rejected kids who make their own society in the mountains in the abandoned estate of an alleged serial killer who died years earlier in an attack on one of his houseguests that resulted in a massive fire. The killer, Leif Winham, is an actor and star whose loneliness and need for attention lead him to keep his houseguests indefinitely and subject them to gruesome experiments. Leif’s story is one of the three different timelines we see in the story. While we don’t learn a lot about Leif, we encounter him through his hiring of Adam, a handyman whom is hired to build a hidden staircase in Leif’s estate, Nowhere. Through this part of the narrative, we learn about how Nowhere came to be, and we understand the ruins of Nowhere in which the current group, the Children of Nowhere, live. Riley and her half-brother Oliver, were living with Cousin, an abusive family member who doesn’t allow Oliver to attend school and subjects him to harsh physical labor. After a mysterious visit from a floating child named Noon who Riley isn’t even sure if she is real or a hallucination, Riley makes a plan to visit Noon’s group, the Children of Nowhere, in the mountains. Noon provides Riley with vague directions through the park, and Riley makes a plan to escape Cousin’s abuses and join the Children of Nowhere. There’s another story line with Marc and Kimble, true crime documentarians, who are interested in the story of the Nowhere Children, and want to visit the ruins of Nowhere for their next documentary. These story lines converge in an exciting and surprising ending. 

Much like Sundial, I couldn’t put this book down once it started. It’s an exciting story of survival amidst trauma and tragedy, and the kind of terror that groups can inflict on outsiders when they experience external and existential threats to their survival. In a lot of ways, the setting of Nowhere Burning, an abandoned estate that initially had grand intentions as a kind of refuge for Leif Winham, literally a kind of nowhere where Winham wished to escape, but also to inflict pain and torture on those he felt where either taking from him or planning to leave him. Like the home in Sundial, Nowhere operates both in the past and the present, and despite its decay it remains a site of life and activity for the runaways that populate Nowhere. I also liked how both novels examine revisiting the sites of past traumas and tragedies. Although Riley and Oliver don’t experience trauma at the original Nowhere estate, their lives as orphans whose mother tragically passed away and whose lives were neglected and abused at Cousin’s house reflect the same kind of harsh existence that some of the characters in Sundial experienced. In fact, both stories look at the impact of a childhood lost to violence and misguided parenting. It’s interesting that the children of Nowhere seek out abusive and neglectful parents in the town and try to either punish these parents or bring their children to Nowhere to live a more idyllic, yet challenging existence, relying on nature, hunting, and farming to survive. I love how both novels challenge the idea of families, calling into question whether parents and other authority figures really know best for how to raise and care for children. 

Furthermore, both Sundial and Nowhere Burning feature an incredibly eerie setting that takes place in ruins. While the novel is being compared to Lord of the Flies, I also think there’s something Dickensian about Nowhere. It reminded me a little of Miss Havisham’s house, and how the children are both afraid of the house, yet seek to maintain it, not really cleaning the ruins, but keeping the decay and filth, maybe as a reminder, but also as a way of their hope that Leif Winham will eventually return. I loved the eerie and haunting, tragic mood of this story, much like the other texts of Ward’s I’ve read. Also like the other texts from Ward I’ve read, there’s quite a few twists and surprises that these characters encounter. While I was able to pick up on one surprising reveal, I didn’t anticipate the ending. Once I hit the halfway part of this book, I couldn’t put it down, and I found the story to be really propulsive and moving. I especially loved the connection that Riley has with her brother Oliver, and how Riley tries to navigate the challenges of belonging to a new group after leaving Cousin’s abusive home. 

Nowhere Burning is an amazing story that includes a strange and famous serial killer, as well as a kind of strange cult of kids who worship him in his abandoned estate. There are traces of folk horror, cult horror, and true crime in this story, but it is also a story about family and bonds, and how even among tragedy and trauma, those bonds that we forge with our family can be important. Riley is a great main character whose resilience and fortitude enable her to navigate challenging situations. I also loved the different children of Nowhere. A group of kids eking out living amidst the ruins of a once great estate was fascinating. There are elements of folk tales and other stories like Peter Pan in this story, but it is a much darker take. The only thing I wished there was more of was the connection the children have to Leif Winham. I don’t remember a clear explanation about how or why they came to appreciate him. There’s also some ambiguity about how the children of Nowhere eventually came to be. We know that there was a power struggle, and Noon and her group eventually won out, but I wondered if there was more to that story than Ward included here. Nevertheless, this was a great book that I couldn’t put down once I really got into the story. Highly recommended!