So I read Timberdark...

 

Today I’m talking about Timberdark by Darren Charlton. I’ll be 100% honest, I didn’t even know this book existed until I saw it in a bookstore. Like I was with a friend, we both went in, and they pointed out that it was the sequel, or a continuation of, Wranglestone. And again, I had no idea this book was even being written. It remained completely off my radar, and I likely wouldn’t have even picked it up had my friend not told me what it was. The weird thing is that I liked Wranglestone, it’s still on my bookshelf, but it was kind of like after I read it, everything went crickets.

Still, the post-apocalyptic blurb says that with the tide turned against the dead, Peter and the remaining community on Wranglestone prepare to leave for town, where the comforts of the world before away them. Could this be the home that finally brings both safety and unity for all? Cooper isn’t so sure. He harbours feelings from that terrible night on the lake and worse, a secret codename, Timberdark. Now to basically cut the last bit short. Peter must uncover the truth about the mysterious Timberdark before their future together and the world around them is placed in danger.

The book opens on a prologue with a guy names Wyatt, in the middle of the night, who gets visited by a very Riverdale-core type creature/person with a deer skull for a face who gives him a slice of raw meat. Wyatt and his wife, Daisy, have been bitten by the Dead, so are practically invisible to them, but now want flesh. We then pop into chapter one and Peter and Cooper are trying to rescue this girl, Betty, who is a Returned, like Cooper – basically a humanoid zombie but not quite a zombie. Now Peter, he’s that annoying person who is in a relationship so needs everyone to know that he’s in a relationship. I guess it’s cute since this is a post-apocalyptic world, but you know for a fact that if Peter and Cooper were in our world then Peter would probably just milk his relationship on TikTok or something, and he’d probably get bullied for it because it’d be so cringe. Still, Betty has something she needs to finish, but the boys end up telling her about Wranglestone, then we go to chapter two where Peter and Cooper basically just talk, that’s it. Peter thinks of this town he’s heard of where Returnees and normal people live in harmony, and Cooper asks if Peter has ever been scared of him and Peter says he never will be. And that obviously meant that he was going to get scared of Cooper at some point. The two also end up seeing that deer skull creature (I’m pretty sure they ended up in Wyatt and Daisy’s cabin) and Peter shoots it. They run, then fall into a valley. Rip in pieces.

I do have to give this book something immediately: It’s unsettling. That first bit with Wyatt, I was neutral on, but once we got back to Peter and Cooper, things were spooky ooky. Also, 19 of the United States had been reformed in this world. So, even though the divas at Wranglestone were living out on a lake, they didn’t have to I don’t think. Then again, one big worry Peter had was that Cooper wouldn’t cope well in a town.

And speaking of a town, this book is split into different parts, and right at the beginning of part two, they’re out of where they were for the majority of the first book and in a town. Peter does, at the end of the first part, say they’re leaving Wranglestone, but I did think that the jump from Wranglestone to the town, West Wranglestone, was a bit sudden. It was one of those, one second you’re in one place, then the next second you’re somewhere else kinds of deals. I would have liked some kind of buffer between the two. Or something else I was thinking was that perhaps the section before Peter and Cooper got to the town could have been shorter, just so we could have gotten to the town earlier, and perhaps spent more time there to show us that things really are different now for them. I think had that happened, then maybe the shift from being out in the wilds and into town wouldn’t have felt so jarring.

This character, I believe it was Teddy, said something to the effect of, “It’s like it’s not our turn anymore” when he was talking to Peter, and that it’s not our turn thing was meant to obviously apply to the “living” and was something I didn’t really understand until the end of the book. At first, I thought it was meant to be something like it’s not our turn to struggle out in the wilds now that we’ve got a town and society and government, it’s the Dead’s turn to struggle in their own way.

I will say, what I wasn’t expecting from this book was a “Boo, modern society bad” speech that lasted three consecutive pages from one of the characters. Like, I understood where the speech was coming from in the context of the book. The whole issue with the Dead was a somewhat recent thing for this book’s universe, and there were people throughout this book, and Wranglestone, that had lived in a time before the Dead. So again, I understand where the speech came from. It was the character saying that the Dead coming showed them what was wrong with the world, and that they’d managed to survive just fine without things like debts, taxes, government, but the book did not need three pages of nothing but the uninterrupted speech.

So that I’m not just complaining, I’ll talk about what I enjoyed about the book.

Peter, as a character. I really liked him and what he did throughout Timberdark, even if the decisions he made weren’t always the best. In his head, he’s thinking that all he and Cooper need is to settle down in a bigger settlement so that they can have some level of normality, especially since he does mention that early in the book. Then as the book goes on, since he’s the main character, you see in his head, instead of anyone else’s, you get to see the journey he goes on and how he grows. I’ll confidently say, Peter was a highlight, like, he was a good character.

Something else I really liked was, I’m not sure exactly which part of the book it was, but there was a solid 100 pages in the last third of the book, before the last few chapters where we find out what’s going on, and what Timberdark actually is. That part of the book? The Boulet Brothers Gagula! I was about to say that it was like everything in the book was leading up to those events, but that was literally the case. Those 100 pages or so were hands down the strongest part of the book.

And even though this is a bit where I’m talking about what I liked, I’m going to link in something I would have liked: Some kind of active conflict in the town, rather than just Peter realising that maybe living in a town isn’t all it was cracked up to be. I think I would have appreciated some kind actual problem, rather than just feelings festering being the issue. Like, whether I’ve said it or not yet in this post, outside of those 100 pages, it doesn’t feel like all that much actually happens (at a decent pace, at least). After I finished reading the book, I went on the Goodreads to look at the reviews to see what other people were saying, and to see if anyone else felt the same as I did. Now I’m just going to insert a quote from the very first review I saw (from Vee_Bookish on Goodreads):

“I sort of understood the message that this story was trying to convey, but I felt like a lot of the actual heart racing, page turning horror was lost in this book.”

This encapsulates exactly how I feel about this book. Those 100 pages that had me capturing the gag did have that heart racing and page turning feeling that I was wanting. It was there, just not for most of the book. And when I looked through the Goodreads reviews, that’s what a lot of people were also saying, so it was nice to have that validation that it wasn’t just me.

That’s where I’m going to leave this post. I wish I could say I enjoyed Timberdark more, but I just didn’t. It definitely had its moments, those 100 or so pages were incredible, and Peter was really good as a character. It was just ultimately a bit disappointing with how slow everything felt.

Okay, bye!