A haunting cosmic horror with a coming-of-age tale of family, love and loss. What does a little boy know about horror? More than what the adults believe. The main character is curious, resilient, and easy to root for. His dog Teach is his best friend, and their relationship had me bawling! His suspicion and later discovery of everything weird in his family made me uneasy. I didn't expect to be hit with an emotional gut punch but this book delivers it tenfold. I finished it in one sitting and wished there was more. One of my favourites of the year.

I find books I loved so hard to review because all I want to say is, "This was brilliant. READ IT!"

I often take book comps with a grain of salt, probably from too many disappointments but when I saw this one advertised last year as Robert McCammon's Boys Life meets the eldritch horror of H.P Lovecraft (minus of the xenophobia dont worry) I was IMMEDIATELY sold!
Boys Life is one of my all-time favourite books, and I love me some cosmic horror.
And guess what? I wasn't let down because it's accurate!

Usually, I'm not a fan of novellas, especially when it comes to horror. I find it works better for me personally as short stories or when it has room to expand and plenty of time (and pages) to let me feel for the characters before ripping out my heart but this was the perfect length. Not a page wasted.

I still can't quite believe it's a debut?!

It nails that almost grief-like state that comes with coming of age, and the choice to pair it with the use of cosmic horror as a metaphor for puberty and turbulent family dynamics? Genius!
Combine those with some hauntingly beautiful prose, I end up with a new favourite book!

I won't say anything else because I do think it's one of those books that's best gone into knowing little to nothing about it.

Needless to say, I'm SO excited to see what S. L. Coney writes next

Wasn’t sure if I’d get on with this one at first but it turned out to be very enjoyable. I loved the eerie vibes throughout and thought the tension build up was great.

Wild Spaces is a perfectly sized coming of age/lovecraftian/ shape shifting novella. When a boy's grandfather comes to stay the family's peaceful and idyllic life comes to an end. Tensions between the adults makes everything uncomfortable and the only relationship that does not suffer is between the boy and his dog. The grandfather has an agenda, and his daughter seems to be lost in a past she thought she had escaped.
Powerful, beautifully told. I read this in one sitting.

Didn't click for me, not sure how I felt about it.

I didn't feel the tension in this the way others have seemed to. It just maybe isn't a genre I really enjoy very much but I was interested in the idea of horror for young people (and one that wasn't over-the-top and obvious like Goosebumps/the Point series of my own teen years).

It's about an 11 year old boy living with his parents in a rather idyllic wetland area, with his dog. His grandfather comes to visit. You're aware there's unspoken feelings, you see the strain between his dad and grandfather.

Then there's some scenes clearly denoting the boy changing physically and his grandfather encouraging this... with some horrific results. But I just didn't like it, feel it was well enough explained, and that it ended before we really become invested and can see what's going to be the likely result of all this.

Maybe just not for me.

With thanks to Netgalley for providing a sample reading copy.

The world through the eyes of a child is a mystifying place. The secrets rules of adults and slowly finding out the truth is never straightforward is a hard learning curve. Understandably many horror tales focus on the innocent child thrown into a terrifying situation be it a strange hotel or battling ghosts. In S L Coney’s evocative horror novella Wild Spaces we have a haunting tale of a family where the past finally catches up with them and wrecks a terrible revenge.

A nameless boy and his parents are surprised and worried when their house on the coast is visited by his maternal grandfather. A man who fills the atmosphere just by his personality and invites himself to stay with them.

The family feel the sudden strain of a man who loves salt, judges his daughter’s husband and shows a growing fascination for the boy’s upbringing. A man who loved to go into the sea even when there is a storm playing out. Slowly the boy realises the interloper is not seeking a family reunion but his own grisly satisfaction.

This is a powerful and spellbinding novella that while in some ways adopts the form of a fairytale - no one is ever named, it’s all primarily viewed with a focus on the boy this is an adult tale. Coney has forced us to watch at a distance and so we are the silent witness to the family drama playing out. We slowly interpret what the boy is incapable of understanding and that makes us on guard a lot faster than the child - that’s a lot more terrifying when we find this man does not like his daughter or her husband and something has clearly happened in the past that made her run from this man.

Coney’s writing is beautifully atmospheric with a focus on the natural atmosphere. The writing has a sense of quiet power. Like the sea outside the boy’s house this is a gathering storm of a tale. The kind of story people whisper when the lights fail to hold an audience’s attention. it was a pleasure to read how scenes unfurled and a simple beach scene oozes with tension and danger. Coney is not afraid for bad things to happen to this family and I also stress their pet. We gradually realise the grandfather is not quite human which casts questions over exactly why is he so interested in the boy.

The finale is a bewitching combination of heartbreak, terror and just a dash of hope. Bad things will happen to good people but just perhaps good in some form will triumph. Coney doesn’t explain everything and the tale is not nearly tied up. That I think helps our sense of horror we have to put the pieces together and we know the future ahead will be hard. Not everyone lives happily ever after forever.

Wild Spaces is a beautiful and suspenseful horror tale that pulled me in to reading it in one sitting. I loved the storytelling and dark lyrical language that made the story come alive. Highly recommended!

It seems like cosmic, unknowable horror has become linked with the sea, and the odd creatures that call it home, thanks to the work of H.P. Lovecraft. Whilst I do like Lovecraft's work, and the things that he created (and were inspired by his mythology) sometimes it feels like authors try to stick too closely to what he did when crafting their own horror tales. Wild Spaces is much like this, and the sea plays an important role in this story of a destruction of a perfect, loving family.

Wild Spaces introduces readers a to family living in South Carolina, an 11-year-old boy and his dog, Teach, along with his mother and father. None of the family receive names, and are referred to only in their roles within the family, and as such it's sometimes hard to see them as actual characters rather than just roles in the story. That being said, Coney does take some time to flesh the parents out a little, at least telling us what they do outside of their family roles, with the father studying endangered clams, and the mother writing pirate history books.

The four of them, the tree humans and the dog, have settled into a decent life, and are happy. However, when the mothers father, the grandfather, arrives one day things begin to change. The narrative gives the impression that the mother and the grandfather are somewhat estranged and that they haven't seen each other in a while. Inviting himself to stay, the grandfather slowly begins to disrupt their lives and their happiness. He makes thinly veiled insults and jabs, and fractures begin to form within the family. When the boy begins to 'change' it starts a series of events that will result in tragedy.

Wild Spaces often times felt like a vague book to me, the family weren't given names, the histories that play an important part in the story are only implied, and the horror is breifly touched upon and never explained. I'm sure that this was done in a way to make the horror feel more real, that the unkowable parts were made in order to get under the readers skin and upset them, and that the family not having names was done to make it feel like a story that could happen to anyone. But, to me, it felt like I was reading something partly finished, something that wasn't quite fully formed.

The book is very short, just over 100 pages, and with the lack of any real depth in the characters and the story I kept feeling like I was reading a rough draft, something that was yet to be filled in and fleshed out. Because of this, I failed to connect with the story, and by the time the horror elements were introduced I was already too bored to really care. I know that this is an issue with myself, and that there are a lot of positive reviews and ratings for the book online. I think this is just a case of me not being the right audience for the book; which does happen from time to time.

As such, my final score represents only my own personal experience in reading Wild Spaces, and your experience could be completely different. The writing itself is decent, and S.L. Coney clearly has a lot of talent, the writing just wasn't what I like. If you're interested in cosmic horror, strange occurrences, or simply want to read something a bit different give Wild Spaces a try. If you don't like it it's only a short commitment, but you might just end up loving it.

I'm sorry, this was incredibly hard to get into, and DNF-ed it at the 35% mark. Thank you for the review copy.

This one didn't quite work for me, but I 100% understand and respect what the author was going for. There was a lot of creepy imagery, very Lovecraftian with all its tentacles and eldritch monsters from the deep, which I appreciated. I also thought the familial relationships were interesting. For me, I just didn't love the plot and was a little bored in parts. Overall, I would definitely pick up something else from the author as I liked the writing style, but this one wasn't my fave.
I received a free copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for a fair and honest review.

I absolutely charged through S.L. Coney’s novella Wild Spaces - a weird, watery story about grief and Lovecraftian tentacle monsters.

It’s about an adolescent boy who lives with his parents and his very good doggo Teach, on the American coast. Into this setting comes the boy’s estranged grandfather, whose presence causes all kinds of inexplicable tension - he needles constantly at the boy’s father, and his mother’s accounts of growing up around the old man are full of holes. And then, one night, the boy sees his grandfather change into something altogether less human, and it becomes clear that whatever is in the old man might be hereditary.

To say more than that is to give away too much of the plot. It’s a strange book, a real slow burn that invests in its atmosphere and characters in a way that some people will find off-putting. But it is fantastically engrossing, and if you get on its wavelength you’ll find it a vivid and deeply moving reflection on adolescence and inherited trauma. It’s great to see some more literary takes on horror - a similar thing has happened to crime/thrillers recently too, with novels like S.A. Cosby’s Blacktop Wasteland exploding onto the scene - and you’ll find a lot to love here.

It also features one of the all-time great dogs in fiction, in the form of the boy’s loyal golden retriever Teach. Perhaps that’s not a selling point for you, but it certainly is for me, and I’ve read a few novels featuring very good doggos recently - shout-out to Six-Thirty, the dog from Lessons in Chemistry - and they are always a joy to discover.

I've actually not stopped thinking about this since I read it, and that's a testament to how strong Coney's writing is. The emotional impact snuck up on me, and the book as a whole has stuck with me like the best horror novels do. Recommended.

I requested Wild Spaces based on a five star rave review from a fellow horror blogger I trust(ed), and sincerely regret it.

The writing is good and the slow build up of tension is well thought out but nothing at all happens until everything happens.

The last twenty pages of the book are a whirlwind of insanity with no real emotion and no explanation. Perhaps the most ambiguous book I've read and I did not enjoy it for that.

Told from the perspective of the boy, the reader is as uninformed and confused as any child would be in this scenario. Body language and the occasional eavesdropping leaves us to piece together what's going on.

On the plus side it was a short novel so it didn't take too long to get to the bottom of why the sudden arrival of his grandfather left the boy, pet dog Teach and his parents so ill at ease.

I loved the relationship between the boy and his dog, aside from that I didn't care for any of Wild Spaces.