Wilderness
7) Wilderness, Dennis Danvers, 376 pages
This is billed by the blurb on the cover as “A remarkable book . . . sensuous and erotic, compelling and deeply serious.”
In retrospect, this should have sent up great, dense smoke clouds of warning.
“Alice White has a secret that stalks her steps and shadows her every thought and feeling. There is no friend or family member she can trust and confide in, especially not the strangers who are her willing accomplices in the fevered one-night stands that are as close as she dares come to love. Then she meets Erik Summers, a college professor and biologist, who inspires a passion she can neither control nor deny, drawing Alice from the cage she has constructed to enclose her life. But though Erik feels her fire and shares with her deep emotions and a spiritual kinship, he recoils from her words, her seeming delusions, her dark truths. Until, in the vast Canadian wilderness, he is forced to confront the reality of both the woman he is coming to love and the nightmare he dreads - as the sinister brightness of the full moon shines down upon Alice White . . . and the change begins once again.
“From Dennis Danvers, the acclaimed author of The Fourth World and Circuit of Heaven, comes a spellbinding, erotically charged novel of love, terror, and transformation that is as satisfying and darkly compelling as anything in modern fiction.”
This is classified as Fantasy, never mind that it takes place in the ultra-normal modern-day world, the only hint of fantasy being that, yes, Alice is a werewolf. The rest of the book has more in common with fiction or romance than with fantasy.
It’s well-written, well-researched (Except for a brief and nit-pickingly inaccurate portrayal of snakes as animals that ‘aerate the soil’ - what? Snakes aren’t worms, Dennis! Cluephone, it’s for you!), and painfully observant novel about how Alice’s condition causes her to be unable to form lasting bonds between herself and other people, and her struggles finally trying to bring someone into her world.
Essentially, the metaphor of the werewolf here, and the titular ‘wilderness’, is used as a means of exploring the formation and decay of relationships between human beings. The book would not have been tremendously different if it had been about, for instance, a schizophrenic or a severely bipolar person. The image of wilderness is used as a symbol of the unexplored territory between human beings, a frontier where relationships die or are formed, where we are utterly human, but still animals for all that. It’s a symbol of the gap we must bridge to form connections.
At about this point you are probably realizing that this book sounds like a chick-flick. You would be utterly right. If talky, painfully meaningful and earnest estro-fests are your thing, this is your book, but if you’re looking for real dark erotica look elsewhere (might I suggest Tanith Lee?).
I liked the characters in spite of myself. The setting was boring as Hell but it was very well drawn and vividly-evoked boredom. You don’t doubt for a minute the mundanity and dullness of most of it. The writing was good, if not transcendently lyrical. At no point was I dulled enough to put it down, but neither was I as entertained as I felt I should have been.
It was not erotic dark fantasy, as billed.
It was, first of all, not really erotic. I’m sorry. A book can contain lots of sex and still not be erotic. This book contained only a moderate amount of sex - not as much as one would think, given the “fevered one-night stands” advertised on the back cover. The one-night stands in question were only mentioned, never depicted, and in fact, at no point could the sex in this book be considered “fevered” or even warm. I could complain that it wasn’t graphic enough, but I can live without squishy details if the ambience is right - this time it wasn’t right, and all that could have saved it would have been squishy details, which were not provided. This simply was not sexy sex. Dennis treats everything so matter-of-factly that I imagined him writing the scenes with rubber gloves on. The most vivid sex scene in the book is a rather cool dream sequence that only serves to point out what he could have done if he’d just let himself get a hard-on.
Nor was it fantasy as I define it - as I said before, it’s really tremendously mundane. It uses a single fantastic element to explore its theme, and the rest is utterly normal to the point of making me, on occasion, want to dig my eyes out with sporks, because I read to escape the real world, and resent being thrust into it in a novel, no matter how well-written the mundanity is.
This book wasn’t even particularly dark. Instead of wrenching pain, which is at least entertaining in a car-wreck sort of way, this book was really pervaded by a sort of awful numbness, spiced with occasional tinglings of discomfort. I am reminded of that grisly phantom limb syndrome thing, only instead of a limb, I am sensing the ghostly shape where the real emotions of this book should have been.
In short, this book is neither erotic, nor dark, nor fantastic enough to deserve a label of dark or erotic fantasy. And it isn’t good enough to warrant seeking it out, unless you are a die-hard werewolf fan who for some reason wishes to combine your obsession with your love of gruesome relationshippy fiction that’s all talk and no spurt.
I give it a 5/10, mostly for the competent writing and generally agreeable characterization. If it had been erotic, as advertised, or if anything much had happened, I’d have given it a 7 or 8.
link
This is billed by the blurb on the cover as “A remarkable book . . . sensuous and erotic, compelling and deeply serious.”
In retrospect, this should have sent up great, dense smoke clouds of warning.
“Alice White has a secret that stalks her steps and shadows her every thought and feeling. There is no friend or family member she can trust and confide in, especially not the strangers who are her willing accomplices in the fevered one-night stands that are as close as she dares come to love. Then she meets Erik Summers, a college professor and biologist, who inspires a passion she can neither control nor deny, drawing Alice from the cage she has constructed to enclose her life. But though Erik feels her fire and shares with her deep emotions and a spiritual kinship, he recoils from her words, her seeming delusions, her dark truths. Until, in the vast Canadian wilderness, he is forced to confront the reality of both the woman he is coming to love and the nightmare he dreads - as the sinister brightness of the full moon shines down upon Alice White . . . and the change begins once again.
“From Dennis Danvers, the acclaimed author of The Fourth World and Circuit of Heaven, comes a spellbinding, erotically charged novel of love, terror, and transformation that is as satisfying and darkly compelling as anything in modern fiction.”
This is classified as Fantasy, never mind that it takes place in the ultra-normal modern-day world, the only hint of fantasy being that, yes, Alice is a werewolf. The rest of the book has more in common with fiction or romance than with fantasy.
It’s well-written, well-researched (Except for a brief and nit-pickingly inaccurate portrayal of snakes as animals that ‘aerate the soil’ - what? Snakes aren’t worms, Dennis! Cluephone, it’s for you!), and painfully observant novel about how Alice’s condition causes her to be unable to form lasting bonds between herself and other people, and her struggles finally trying to bring someone into her world.
Essentially, the metaphor of the werewolf here, and the titular ‘wilderness’, is used as a means of exploring the formation and decay of relationships between human beings. The book would not have been tremendously different if it had been about, for instance, a schizophrenic or a severely bipolar person. The image of wilderness is used as a symbol of the unexplored territory between human beings, a frontier where relationships die or are formed, where we are utterly human, but still animals for all that. It’s a symbol of the gap we must bridge to form connections.
At about this point you are probably realizing that this book sounds like a chick-flick. You would be utterly right. If talky, painfully meaningful and earnest estro-fests are your thing, this is your book, but if you’re looking for real dark erotica look elsewhere (might I suggest Tanith Lee?).
I liked the characters in spite of myself. The setting was boring as Hell but it was very well drawn and vividly-evoked boredom. You don’t doubt for a minute the mundanity and dullness of most of it. The writing was good, if not transcendently lyrical. At no point was I dulled enough to put it down, but neither was I as entertained as I felt I should have been.
It was not erotic dark fantasy, as billed.
It was, first of all, not really erotic. I’m sorry. A book can contain lots of sex and still not be erotic. This book contained only a moderate amount of sex - not as much as one would think, given the “fevered one-night stands” advertised on the back cover. The one-night stands in question were only mentioned, never depicted, and in fact, at no point could the sex in this book be considered “fevered” or even warm. I could complain that it wasn’t graphic enough, but I can live without squishy details if the ambience is right - this time it wasn’t right, and all that could have saved it would have been squishy details, which were not provided. This simply was not sexy sex. Dennis treats everything so matter-of-factly that I imagined him writing the scenes with rubber gloves on. The most vivid sex scene in the book is a rather cool dream sequence that only serves to point out what he could have done if he’d just let himself get a hard-on.
Nor was it fantasy as I define it - as I said before, it’s really tremendously mundane. It uses a single fantastic element to explore its theme, and the rest is utterly normal to the point of making me, on occasion, want to dig my eyes out with sporks, because I read to escape the real world, and resent being thrust into it in a novel, no matter how well-written the mundanity is.
This book wasn’t even particularly dark. Instead of wrenching pain, which is at least entertaining in a car-wreck sort of way, this book was really pervaded by a sort of awful numbness, spiced with occasional tinglings of discomfort. I am reminded of that grisly phantom limb syndrome thing, only instead of a limb, I am sensing the ghostly shape where the real emotions of this book should have been.
In short, this book is neither erotic, nor dark, nor fantastic enough to deserve a label of dark or erotic fantasy. And it isn’t good enough to warrant seeking it out, unless you are a die-hard werewolf fan who for some reason wishes to combine your obsession with your love of gruesome relationshippy fiction that’s all talk and no spurt.
I give it a 5/10, mostly for the competent writing and generally agreeable characterization. If it had been erotic, as advertised, or if anything much had happened, I’d have given it a 7 or 8.
link