Raise your hand if you love to go camping. You will note my hand is down.
Besides Girl Scout camp, where I mostly remember bugs and teasing and being unable to sleep because of the stories about the Bloody Hook of the Goat Killer, I really only went camping once. Probably in about… 1980.
We arrived someplace in North Carolina and stayed overnight at some motel in the Appalachians, in order to get up early to head out on the Appalachian Trail the next morning.
(There was a boyfriend involved, and I wanted to prove what a good sport I was. Never a good plan.)
We were awakened in the middle of the night by the wail of sirens and ran out into the motel parking lot to find a swarm of firetrucks, light-glaring police cars, and a crowd of people gathering, everyone looking in the same direction. They were pointing at the smoke and fire coming from the hills behind us.
“There’s a fire,” I said unnecessarily. “A huge fire!”
“Yep,” one of the bystanders said to me. “Baby did it.”
“’Baby did it’?” I repeated, wondering if I had heard correctly.
“Yep,” they said. “Baby got out of jail, I guess, and he loves to set fires.”
It was all I could do not to leap into the car and drive home.
“You here to camp?” the guy asked.
“Yep,” I said, reluctantly.
“Which way are you all going?” he asked.
I pointed in the direction that we were not going.
The next day, about an hour into the trail, carrying the world’s heaviest backpack and wearing my way-too-new hiking shoes, it began to rain, torrentially — cold, ugly rain — and it did not stop for two days. So fun.
But I am particularly fond of mysteries and thrillers that take place in these kinds of locations — woods and forests and campsites — because every cell in my body knows how terrifying those locations can be.
The isolation, the sounds of the trees and creatures creeping behind them, the impossible and unpredictable weather, the lurking of potentially terrifying strangers, and the general lack of communication. And electricity.
Even a beautiful chic cabin in the woods can become devastatingly sinister when the wrong people live there.
So I have been happily (with the lights on and no bugs) devouring some recent and riveting novels that take me to places on the page where I would rather not go in real life.
Here are 6 books that have recently taken me into the woods again:
RELATED POSTS:
“Into the Woods: 10 Chilling Tales About What’s Lurking in the Shadows”
“A Locked Room Is Not Always a Locked Room”
“Feel-Good Reads to Bring Comfort This Fall”
Find More Articles By and About Tall Poppy Writers Here
The Last to Vanish by Megan Miranda
I don’t think this is where I was camping, but it feels like it was close by. Miranda’s sinister and secretive Cutter’s Pass, North Carolina is known as the most dangerous town on the Appalachian Trail — a place where way too many hikers have mysteriously and inexplicably vanished. When a stranger comes to town — the curious Abigail Lovett — she gets a job managing an upscale trail resort and gets terrifyingly tangled in the town’s business. Including, maybe, a cover-up. Or maybe two. You will be shocked and surprised by what happens next. What a terrific book!
The Wicked Sister — and The Marsh King‘s Daughter by Karen Dionne
Dionne‘s wilderness voice is a treasure, and these two immersive and frightening tales reflect Dionne’s unmatched experiences in the wild. The authenticity of the dangers that lurk in the denseness of Michigan’s upper peninsula combined with the mysteries that lurk in the darkness of the human mind combine superbly and rivetingly in both of these novels by a Tall Poppy Writer.
And Marsh King’s Daughter is about to hit the big screen — you’ll want to read it first!
Secluded Cabin Sleeps Six by Lisa Unger
When you see a title like that, doesn’t a whole story appear in your brain? We know that secluded means isolated and terrifying, we know that no one will actually sleep, and we know that whichever six people enter, there will be fewer who leave. “Stay home!,” we want to warn them, but they don’t. Unger is a master of atmosphere, both internal and external, and her newest is absolutely terrifyingly riveting.
One Step Too Far by Lisa Gardner
I absolutely could not turn the pages fast enough of this brilliant novel. Set in the wilderness of Wyoming, where years ago, a group of buddies celebrating an upcoming wedding with a camping trip ended with one of them missing. Every year, led by the missing man’s tyrannical father, they come back to search for him.
This time, they’re accompanied by Gardner‘s iconic Frankie Elkin, who learns to tackle hiking and camping the hard way. The extremely hard way. Accompanied by a Labrador named Daisy. It’s relentless and surprising, and Library Journal dubbed it “breathtakingly brilliant.” I agree.
The Wedding Plot: A Mercy Car Mystery #4 by Paula Munier
At first, Paula Munier was known as “Julia Spencer-Fleming with dogs,” and that’s correct — but now she’s carved out her own personal wilderness niche with her twisty traditional mystery series. Her Vermont settings are lovingly and immersively detailed, and the main character, Mercy Carr — a veteran of the war in Afghanistan and now recovering along with the equally bereft bomb-sniffing Malinois named Elvis — is deeply loved by her readers.
In this book, Mercy and Elvis attend a wedding at a remote resort in the Green Mountains, where a sudden summer storm leaves them all in the dark. With a murderer.
The House Across the Lake by Riley Sager
Okay, it’s not camping, but it is secluded houses, lots of woods, super isolation and a crop of mysterious people with sinister agendas.
Characters are cut off from the outside world and consume a lotta lotta lotta bourbon. Riley Sager is not only a riveting writer but a completely brave storyteller. And this story will enchant you.
In A Dark, Dark Wood by Ruth Ware
Finally, these are not new, but also in my pantheon of camping/wilderness/outdoors-as-antagonist crime fiction are the following:
Ruth Ware’s iconic In A Dark, Dark Wood (Gallery/Scout Press), Erica Ferencik’s Into the Jungle (Gallery/Scout Press), and Julie Carrick Dalton’s lyrical and atmospheric Waiting for the Night Song (Forge Books).
And there’s, of course, Deliverance (Houghton Mifflin) by James Dickey, from which I will never recover.
If you’re wondering — we never found out if they actually caught Baby, or if Baby actually set that fire. The good news was that it rained so hard that entire weekend that there was no possibility of a fire. Not even in our campfire.
So fun! Reading is better.
