The Wild Dead, by Carrie Vaughn (Houghton Mifflin
Harcourt)
I loved Vaughn’s Philip K. Dick Award-winning novel, Bannerless, and eagerly dove into this,
its sequel. Vaughn’s vision of an egalitarian, post-collapse world struck me as
a welcome and necessary antidote to the commonly portrayed descent into
dog-eat-dog chaos. In her world, people worked cooperatively after “The Fall”
to select and preserve technology and to establish social structures that
promoted communities living in ecological balance, carefully limiting
overconsumption, overproduction and birth rate. In other words, the survivors
were intelligent about how they went about rebuilding civilization. That’s just
the background, the setting, to the murder mysteries in Bannerless and The Wild Dead.
Given lots of knowledge but scarce forensic resources due to
a generation-ago picking and choosing, how would you go about solving a murder?
You know basic chemistry and anatomy, and you have solar power and
well-machined instruments, but have no way to analyze DNA, trace evidence, or microscopic
kerf marks. When Enid and her apprentice, Teeg, arrive at the Estuary as investigators,
this world’s traveling magistrates, their initial task, the one they’ve been
requested to adjudicate, pertains to the fate of an old house that’s one of the
few relics of “Before” yet is too badly damaged to be easily repairable.
As they examine the issue of the house, a body washes up in
the river, a young woman of the wild folk who live outside the communities of
Coast Road, and it’s up to Enid and Teeg to solve the murder. Without modern
forensics or knowledge of the history and social interactions of the Estuary households,
yet with a deep moral sense and compassion for this unknown victim, Enid dives
into the case. As with Bannerless,
Enid’s own intelligence and intuitive understanding of human nature guide her
to the unexpected but perfectly prepared result.
I can’t praise Vaughn’s work highly enough. The elegance of
her prose rises and falls like harmonic waves, from serviceably transparent to
downright poetic, enhancing the emotional beats. Even her secondary characters
are beautifully depicted. Most of all, I admire her decision to place her unusual
murder mysteries in a world that gives me hope for the survival of sanity and
kindness.
The usual disclaimer: I received a review copy of this book,
but no one bribed me to say anything about it.
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