Fungal horror has been an undercurrent in horror for quite some time, Jeff VanderMeer has been telling stories featuring creepy mushrooms for years, T. Kingfisher makes the world around us seem terrifying and of course there’s the global phenomena The Last of Us. Wendy N. Wagner picks up the spores and plants the roots of her Girl in the Creek in the Pacific Northwest, with tales of missing hikers, strange growths, and an eerie collective mind in this “Sporror” novel.
The Clackamas National Forest has always been a sanctuary for evil—human and alien. The shadows of looming trees and long-abandoned mines shelter poachers and serial killers alike. Then there’s the ruined hotel on the outskirts of picturesque small town Faraday, Oregon, nestled in the foothills of Mt. Hood. The one drowning in mushrooms and fungus not even the local expert can identify. Not to mention the stacks of missing persons cases. Freelance writer Erin Harper arrives in Faraday to find out what happened to her brother, whose disappearance in the forest has haunted her for years. But someone else has gone missing. And when Erin finds her in the creek, the girl vanishes again — this time from the morgue, and days later her fingerprints show up at a murder scene. Maybe it’s a serial killer, or maybe it’s the spores infecting the forest and those lost inside. Erin must find answers quickly, before anyone else goes missing. But she might be next…
Erin runs a true-crime podcast, which is part of why she journeys to Mt. Hood / The Clackamas National Forest in Oregon, so she could research a rash of disappearance. The other reason, and the heart of it all, is that her brother Bryan disappeared in this region 5 years prior to the novel’s beginning. When she arrives, more creepiness ensues because those disappearances go deeper into the past than she realizes. She and her friends discover a body with strange growths on it, which could be a clue.
Unbeknownst to Erin (and most characters) is the collective mind – The Strangeness – that suffuses the region, connecting infected foxes, other animals, and vegetative growth together. The source of this Strangeness may not be of this world.
While Erin and The Strangeness are the two primary points of view in the novel, there are quite a few supporting characters and unfortunately, that’s where my primary challenge with fully enjoying this novel came to be. Outside of the owner of the boarding home (Olivia Vanderpoel) where Erin was staying, the other side characters muddied the plot of the novel for me and weren’t super distinct from each other.
The character of Olivia had weight and felt quite real, I enjoyed what she represented in the story (a member of the family from the region) and how her relationship evolved with Erin and the other characters. In fact, I’d love to read more stories that featured only Olivia and Erin getting into supernatural hijinks in the Pacific Northwest while the hang out at the local independent brewery.
I was fascinated with The Strangeness and the chapters Wagner told from that collective mind’s point of view. There was a creepiness to the intelligence that connected the non-human beings in the region that was at times identifiable and empathetic while unsettling at others. The alien sentience, coupled with creepy growths in the area and on corpses, make for some unique flavors in a horror novel. In fact, I felt some elements of folk horror as well, but the blending of those elements with the otherworldly nature (pun not intended) of the horrors felt fresh.
Where Wagner concludes the story…thumbs up. But overall, a mixed bag for me. Some awesome horror/creepy elements, solid individual characters, but maybe too many side characters for my personal reading attention. I like that a local brewery was a prominent setting, as I’m a bit of an “enthusiast” of craft beer.
Kudos to the wonderful, eye-catching cover by Greg Ruth, too. It would be difficult not go grab this book off the shelf with that image staring out to potential readers.
© 2025 Rob H. Bedford
Hardcover | July 2025 https://winniewoohoo.com/ | https://winniewoohoo.com/novels/the-creek-girl/ https://reactormag.com/excerpts-girl-in-the-creek-by-wendy-n-wagner/ Review copy courtesy of the publisher, Tor Nightfire
