Set on a remote island off the coast of Scotland, Emma Seckel’s debut The Wild Hunt unfolds within a magical frame that’s hitched to the island’s specific geography. In this stirring and atmospheric historical novel, the setting plays a dominant role. The island’s coastline of harsh cliffs appears out of the fog like the answer to a prayer or the opening of a fairy tale, according to the ferry captain who travels there from the mainland. As the novel opens, Leigh Welles returns from the mainland following her father’s sudden death and finds her home disturbingly changed: fields that should be harvested lie overgrown, important monuments sit neglected, covered in moss. But the biggest change isn’t in the surroundings or the town. It’s the sluagh — a crowd of restless, otherworldly birds that haunt the island for one month each year.

Staying in her childhood home after her father’s funeral, Leigh joins her neighbors for the ritual marking the arrival of the sluagh at the beginning of October. A towering bonfire is encircled by islanders, some in “billowing white robes and a great birdlike mask over their faces — awful carved things, sharp curving beaks and wide gaping eyes.” The scene is a spectacle, the mood foreboding. After the ritual, the sluagh descends violently on the crowd. Seventeen-year-old Hugo McClare, a soft-spoken family friend who wrote letters to Leigh while she was away, grabs a crow from the pack and kills it. The next morning, Leigh learns that Hugo has gone missing. Emboldened, she partners with Iain MacTaverish, a war pilot and widower, on an island-wide search for Hugo. What follows is a beautifully rendered exploration of the island, with its shared grief, its uncertain future, and its current, recurring challenge — the sluagh.

The term sluagh comes from the longer Scottish Gaelic phrase sluagh na marbh, meaning “host of the dead.” According to folklore, the birds represent dead people whose unfinished business in this world leaves them searching for a point of entry into the next. In Seckel’s novel, the sluagh have been visiting the island for so long that they are threaded into the island’s myths and rituals, including incantations the community uses to keep the birds away, and rituals performed to mark their annual arrival and departure. In recent years, the sluaghs have become more aggressive and menacing. The birds — large, imposing crows — break through boarded windows, thrash at passersby, and even kill farm animals.

Seckel makes it clear that the mounting aggression has a clear explanation: World War II. The close-knit island community have lost sons, brothers, fathers, and the birds of the sluagh are hosts of these unhappy dead. Even though no one will talk about it, the evidence of their shared grief is apparent in those overgrown fields and moss-covered memorials that Leigh noticed right away. Seckel layers the events of the story with these reminders of the past. Even Hugo’s disappearance — the present-day mystery that propels the action for most of the novel — is coupled with the tragedy of the war: “Hugo McClare, disappeared almost five years to the day that his brother had flown into an eternal violet evening.” When Hugo’s older brother dies on an expedition during the war, the loss is felt throughout the community. Hugo goes missing after attacking one of the sluagh, but the connection to his brother’s death makes it clear that the aggression of the slaugh isn’t a coincidence, and Hugo’s outburst perhaps isn’t either. Seckel’s reminder hints at a larger meaning coiled within this mystery.

Seckel’s deft handling of such subtleties shapes her story that its images of war, rituals, and birds never devolve into cliché or caricature. For instance, when Leigh notices the difference in the sluagh after her return to the island, she reflects on the changes in the birds’ behavior during the war:

She remembered when the sluagh had grown so numerous that their once-elegant ballets in the air had blacked out the sky. Great unnatural clouds. She remembered coming across one of the island ponies that usually roamed free, set upon by so many birds that it had been torn to pieces. She remembered hearing them peck at the westward shutters, remembered them almost prying those shutters open, remembered the day her father nailed the windows shut for the first time as the birds sat in the trees and watched. Before the war it had been easy to think that was all they were. Birds. Just crows, until they weren’t.

Here, Seckel skillfully unpacks Leigh’s memories of the sluagh, starting with the reference to their long-gone elegance and building up to their undeniable otherworldliness. Her precise word choice keeps images, like that of crows in the sky, from seeming too familiar, and the repetition emphasizes Leigh’s mounting concern for the birds and what they might do to the islanders. Throughout the novel, Seckel draws a dense portrait of a community in turmoil and Leigh’s determination to find a way forward. The result is a moving story exploring home, loss, and grief, and it is an irresistible read.

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