About this item
Highlights
- "The Wild Inside is an unusual love story and a creepy horror novel -- think of the Brontë sisters and Stephen King.
- Author(s): Jamey Bradbury
- 320 Pages
- Fiction + Literature Genres, Literary
Description
Book Synopsis
"The Wild Inside is an unusual love story and a creepy horror novel -- think of the Brontë sisters and Stephen King." --John Irving
A promising talent makes her electrifying debut with this unforgettable novel, set in the Alaskan wilderness, that is a fusion of psychological thriller and coming-of-age tale in the vein of Jennifer McMahon, Chris Bohjalian, and Mary Kubica.
A natural born trapper and hunter raised in the Alaskan wilderness, Tracy Petrikoff spends her days tracking animals and running with her dogs in the remote forests surrounding her family's home. Though she feels safe in this untamed land, Tracy still follows her late mother's rules: Never Lose Sight of the House. Never Come Home with Dirty Hands. And, above all else, Never Make a Person Bleed.
But these precautions aren't enough to protect Tracy when a stranger attacks her in the woods and knocks her unconscious. The next day, she glimpses an eerily familiar man emerge from the tree line, gravely injured from a vicious knife wound--a wound from a hunting knife similar to the one she carries in her pocket. Was this the man who attacked her and did she almost kill him? With her memories of the events jumbled, Tracy can't be sure.
Helping her father cope with her mother's death and prepare for the approaching Iditarod, she doesn't have time to think about what she may have done. Then a mysterious wanderer appears, looking for a job. Tracy senses that Jesse Goodwin is hiding something, but she can't warn her father without explaining about the attack--or why she's kept it to herself.
It soon becomes clear that something dangerous is going on . . . the way Jesse has wormed his way into the family . . . the threatening face of the stranger in a crowd . . . the boot-prints she finds at the forest's edge.
Her family is in trouble. Will uncovering the truth protect them--or is the threat closer than Tracy suspects?
From the Back Cover
In Alaska, the winters are long and dark, the land untamed. Tracy Petrikoff has always loved her family's remote home and her parents' business training and racing sled dogs. It seemed only a matter of time before Tracy's father won the Iditarod--and perhaps, not too long after, Tracy herself would win.
But now everything is different. With the death of Tracy's mother the year before, the family is mired in grief and struggling to keep the business alive. When a stranger knocks Tracy unconscious in the woods, she does not tell her father. She does not want to give him another reason to worry. But shortly thereafter, another stranger emerges from the woods, looking for a job, and Tracy's omission becomes the first strand in a web drawing tightly over her family. Now the isolation Tracy has always valued in her home has begun to seem like a threat, and Tracy must decide what she will do to protect those she loves best.
Review Quotes
"An unusual love story and a creepy horror novel -- think of the Brontë sisters and Stephen King...The architecture of the storytelling is faultless." -- John Irving
"Original and compelling." -- Anchorage Daily News
"A unique take on rural noir." -- Publishers Weekly
"[Jamey] Bradbury has written a lovely and intense novel about the precarious balance of life and death, what it means to be human and fragile in a hostile environment, and, perhaps, what it means to be something other than entirely human." -- Library Journal (starred review)
"[Jamey] Bradbury cultivates vivid atmosphere with visceral action and a dynamic cast of characters...readers who like earthy, genre-blending, coming-of-age stories should be pleased." -- Booklist
"A taut, atmospheric thriller...Jamey Bradbury has crafted a stunning debut full of secrets and hunger, grief and longing. Like the cold of an Alaskan winter, this book chilled me and wrapped me in quiet dread." -- Jennifer McMahon
"A uniquely American coming-of-age tale set on the Alaskan frontier where the borderlines between civilization and savagery...become blurred...A remarkable fable of growing up in the new world." -- Joshua Gaylord, author of When We Were Animals