Bear Season
by Gemma Fairclough
On its website, Wild Hunt Books is described as an indie publishing house founded in South London in 2020. It shares the same ethos as its “little sister”, Wild Hunt Magazine, set up in 2016 to celebrate weird and surreal fiction and to give a platform to emerging authors in the said genres. Following a successful Kickstarter campaign, Wild Hunt Books has issued its first publication – Bear Season by Gemma Fairclough – with a second (The Burning Child of Bantry by Hanna Nielson) set to follow soon.
Bear Season is certainly an auspicious start to Wild Hunt’s publishing campaign: a gripping Gothic novel imbued with echoes of myth and folklore. Its protagonist is Jade Hunter, a doctoral student from the UK who goes missing after travelling to a folklore symposium in Alaska to deliver a talk about bears and their relationship to women in fairy tales. Ursula Smith, a reclusive survivalist, is convicted of her murder but, with no body ever found, Jade’s disappearance remains a tantalising mystery. Interest in her case is fuelled by the online leak (and subsequent deletion) of Jade’s doctoral thesis, which suggests that Jade’s obsessive interest in the figure of the bear was more than simply academic....
In both theme and narrative structure, Bear Season reworks familiar horror tropes into a work which is thoroughly original and compelling. Fairclough resorts to the time-tested Gothic formula of found texts and unreliable narrators. As indicated in its subtitle, the novel is, purportedly, a report “On the Disappearance of Jade Hunter by Carla G Young”. Young is an investigative journalist who gets hold of the leaked doctoral thesis and the abstract of Jade’s proposal for the Alaskan conference, and presents them as “evidence” alongside her theories about Jade’s disappearance. Young’s report is also based on several interviews with supposed murderer Ursula Smith. Yet, none of the “voices” represented here can be fully trusted – it is unclear whether Jade intends her seemingly bizarre beliefs to be taken seriously although that seems to be the case; Ursula is widely considered an eccentric old woman who might have an interest in hiding the truth and her “statements” are not quoted directly but paraphrased by Young; Young herself, one suspects, has personal motives in investigating the matter.
As in the best weird/uncanny fiction, one is left wondering where the truth lies, and whether the mystery has a supernatural explanation. In a brilliant touch, the “report” references real-life events and academic works (for instance, the McCandless case, authentic folk tales, the “therian” phenomenon, and the studies of Bruno Bettelheim on fairytales), further blurring the lines between truth and fiction.
There is much to unpack in this work. The setting – the awe-inspiring yet threatening beauty of the Alaskan terrain – gives a nod to the Romantic Gothic’s obsession with the natural "Sublime" as well as to survival/Polar horror. This complements the novel’s exploration of the sometimes fluid boundaries between man and beast. There is also a strong undercurrent of feminist Gothic – Jade’s identification with the figure of the bear is her way of escaping from an increasingly claustrophobic relationship.
With its myriad themes and “meta” elements, Bear Season could
be deemed a work of literary post-horror. If this description makes it sound dull, fear not: it is also (or perhaps, first
and foremost) a page-turner with plenty of chills and thrills.
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