A History of Wild Places

This is the first adult book by Shea Ernshaw, an Oregon YA author,  was a puzzler for a long time--it's almost 500 pages long--and I didn't know until near the very end if it was supposed to be about the supernatural or just humans behaving badly.  It opens as Travis Wren, a man riddled with guilt because he failed to find his younger before she committed suicide, has been asked to find a missing children's book author, Maggie St. James. She's been gone for 5 years, but Travis has a special ability to see people and events associated with objects. A silver book charm that was found near Maggie's abandoned car in northern California provides him with a trail to follow deep into the woods. When his truck gets stuck in the winter snow miles from the main road, he, too, disappears. The story then shifts to several years later and Theo and Calla are a married couple living in a run down farmhouse with Calla's younger sister, Bee, who is blind. They are part of an off-the-grid, self-sustaining community called Pastoral. The leader of the community is charismatic Levi, Bee's lover and, it turns out, the father of her as yet unborn baby. The community believes that their is a deadly disease that infects the woods that surrounds them and that, if they venture beyond the boundaries of Pastoral, they will also become infected and die. People who are caught going outside the boundaries of Pastoral are subjected to purification, being buried up to their necks, to determine if they have become infected. Bee's blindness has given her a hypersensitivity to sounds and she often attends the community's midwife at birthings because she can hear the baby's heartbeat. A baby born prematurely, who will die without medical intervention, precipitates a crisis in the community. Levi declares that one life must be sacrificed to protect the community, but the baby's father takes steps on his own to leave. Theo's job in the community is to watch the gate and make sure no one comes in and no one leaves, but he has an insatiable desire to go beyond the boundary himself. When he tells his wife that he has been going down the road beyond the gate during his night shifts, she is terrified he will die, but protects his secret. More and more secrets emerge until Calla and Theo come to realize that things in the community are not as they seem. Publishers Weekly says the plot "strains credulity, and the prose is often simplistic, but the twisty plot brims with tension." Booklist enthuses, "A richly embroidered tapestry deepens in hues as the story turns darker. Readers will sink into this one, and although they might question details of the resolution, they will be moved by the novel's power."