Girl in the Creek by Wendy N. Wagner | Horror Fiction Review

This book brings the ick. 🍄

My 2 Cents for Free!

Girl In the Creek by Wendy N. Wagner

Released July 15, 2025

Source: Netgalley

Get it at your local library or see more @ Goodreads

Erin is a young  journalist who heads to a small town an hour out of Portland to write an article. Faraday is tucked away and filled with woods and mushrooms and rot, as well as poachers and murderers of people. People go missing and no one seems to care very much. There’s definitely a terrible story here but it’s also personal for her as her beloved brother went missing in the area a few years earlier.

Erin meets up with a podcasting group and a bunch of their friends and, for the life of me, I couldn't tell you much about any of them because they all sort of hang around on the periphery (waiting to get picked off, it seems to me) and we don’t get to know them as people which was a frustrating experience. They’re all young and beautiful and smart but none of them have developed personalities. Oh well, some people are just boring, I suppose. They run around investigating and find some terribly gross things. Even with all of the decay and dead bodies, there is something very much not normal about this place.

This read like a slow boil eco-thriller/mystery/sci-fi adventure to me and I guess I was expecting something a little different after seeing all of the T.Kingfisher comparisons. T. Kingfisher books typically have quirky characters and humor and aren't entirely deadly serious. Some people are saying one of the characters was humorous but I guess it wasn’t my type of humor or I’m just a grouch because I totally missed it. I wish pubs would stop comparing writers like that. I mean, I get it, they want to make a buck and sell a book but it can lead a reader astray and each writer has their own unique way of telling a story.  

I enjoyed this for what it was but I wasn’t able to fall into the story in the way I’d hoped. I’m unsure if it was the book, the fact that I was caring for two doggies who had the runs all week, or the sometimes monotonous cadence of the narrator. I’m guessing it was a deadly combination of all three. At normal speed the pace creeped. I sped things up but I often found myself rewinding full chapters because my attention strayed which isn’t something I do too often when I’m deep into an audiobook.

This book has some dire things to say about the depressing state of the climate and the terrible people on our planet who freely and carelessly discard people, animals and the environment simply because they can get away with it. It also creates a fungus filled atmosphere and icky body horror spectacularly but I fear I may just be fungus'd out right now so feel free to ignore me. If this is your thing, give it a go.

2.5 bumping up to 3

Final Rating: ⭐⭐1/2

Publisher Plot Synopsis 

The Girl in the Creek by Hugo Award winner Wendy N. Wagner is an atmospheric and eerie story about a Pacific Northwest forest that seems to be devouring all who enter. A perfect read for fans of T. Kingfisher and Jeff VanderMeer’s cli-fi cosmic horror.

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…