Zoë Rankin’s 4 Favorite Nature-Centric Thrillers
I am a sucker for a book that throws you into a wild desolate setting; a place void of people and civilization, but that is shaped by secrets and harsh winds. There is something about being immersed in a remote setting that feels less like reading and more like breathing the same air as your characters.
The four books that I have chosen combine the harshness of nature with the emotions and suspense of a thriller and, as a result, they hit hard. Most of them also touch on important messages about our environment and humanity. The characters and natural setting crawl under your skin and leave a mark. None of these books have truly left me. Each of them, in some way, has stayed with me long after I turned the final page. In truth, I probably sat staring at the last page of each of these books – thinking, crying, struggling to breath – for a long time before being able to return them to the shelf. This sense of wildness and heart is something that I hope to have captured in The Vanishing Place.
Nature isn’t merely a character in this book. Nature is the heart and soul of it. A father and his three children live alone on a remote island, the sea and the hash landscape an ingrained part of them. Then, one day, a storm washes a woman onto the rocks – an outsider. One of the things that is so fantastic – so powerful and raw – about this novel is that fact that the characters’ lives are secondary to the forces of nature. The wild environment, and the consequences of a ravaged planet, profoundly impact the characters’ stories and the way that events unfold. In this novel, Charlotte McConaghy beautifully and tragically highlights the point that humans have disrespected nature to the extent that they are now at its mercy. This is a book that pulsed deep within me, beating in my chest as I breathed the same salt air as the characters and felt the same biting wind on my face. There is no distance between the reader and character, there is no shielding of the pain and isolation that they feel. I lived and suffered it with them. Wild Dark Shore is an exquisitely written book that champions the natural world and the power of the human heart.
Discover the Book
On the remote West Coast of the South Island, New Zealand, vast forests stretch out between mountain ranges and rugged beaches. There, in the small town of Koraha, not a lot happens – until a young girl with blood on her hands walks out of the bush and into the local store, collapsing to the floor. She can’t – or won’t – speak to anyone. It’s the town’s sole policeman who recognises her face. The girl looks exactly like a child, Effie, who disappeared into the trees twenty years ago. The sudden appearance of the girl digs up long buried secrets, and the terrors of the past come rushing back to surface.
This book was written without a plan; it grew, sentence by sentence, with nothing but a face and a feeling to guide me. The muddied face of a lost girl – her piercing green eyes and her long red hair – and the feelings of fear and wonder that are evoked by the vast New Zealand bush. As I wrote my way deeper into the trees, I realised that I wasn’t just writing a thriller; I was writing a story about memory, strength, and the unseen ties that bind us. I hope this is a book that will grip the reader’s heart and stay with them.
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