What’s the book? How to Survive Camping: the Man with No Shadow by Bonnie Quinn
What kind of dark is it? Ghosts and goblins and moderate gore
How good is it? 7/10 faerie tricks
It starts with a list of rules, which had me worried. The list was funny, a good mix of sound camping tips (how to space your tents and avoid flooding) and rules for avoiding death at the hands of mysterious beings (apparently the children with no wagon are not to be trusted and the man with no shadow is bad news). The list promised a fun romp in the haunted woods but it also felt a bit gimmicky, so I worried that haunted romp would be thin on character development and lazily plotted, perhaps. I was delighted to find I was mostly wrong. This wasn’t a deep character study or anything but the story that grows from this goofy set of rules is pretty satisfying.
The woman who wrote the rules is Kate, who inherited this campground when her parents died. She was pretty young when they were taken from her, not quite finished with college, so she had a rough start running the place but it’s been several years now and she’s started to really get the hang of the job by now. Or so she thinks.
This piece of land has been in Kate’s family for a few generations now, which is a source of pride and stability but also the source of most of Kate’s problems. Her family has owned the land so long that it’s become Old with a capital ‘O’. The kind that attracts beings of myth and folklore like fairies and shulikun, along with beings that have power but no stories to their names. At least none Kate’s found in the many books on folklore that line her office walls. Kate’s campground is a huge source of income for the nearby town but it’s also understood that Kate’s job is to keep all those beings contained and controlled. Keep the town safe, keep the land in the family. A simple mandate but not always easy to carry out. Lately things have gotten extra difficult. Some of her land’s inhabitants have gotten restless and one in particular, the Man with no Shadow, seems to want a change of leadership.
I like Kate. She doesn’t seem like a very nice person, truth be told, but she’s tough and serious about her duties both mundane and supernatural. I found myself rooting for her as she fought both the Man with No Shadow and a whole lot of her ungrateful neighbors. I started to see her as tough but fair, willing to take each eldritch being on its own merits; if you’re a being (human or supernatural) willing to deal fairly with Kate, she’s willing to deal fairly with you. I found it refreshing to follow someone trying to really wrestle with and live along side the forces of darkness instead of the usual fleeing or fighting we usually get. Though Kate’s not afraid to kick ass when she needs to. The story was a good balance for me between tough kickassery and vulnerable humanity.
It’s also a perfect book for October, the spooky season of ghosts and goblins and darkening skies, because it’s all about learning to live with the things that go bump in the night. Quinn is a newer author and this is the first in what is now a growing series of stories about Kate and her campground. I plan to eventually pick up further installments of Kate’s adventures and if you want a cozy bit of autumn horror this would be a good choice.
