WILD COUNTRY is another glorious entry in Anne Bishop's
Others offshoot series, which goes by the mouthful of The
World of the Others. Anne Bishop is one of my
all-time favorite authors, up there with Patricia Briggs and
Ilona Andrews. My lord, this woman makes my flesh crawl in a
delightfully creepy way with each new Others book! WILD
COUNTRY happens concurrently with events from ETCHED IN
BONE from Bishop's The
Others series, which is pretty cool to see from
another perspective. WILD COUNTRY can be enjoyed on its own
without requiring the reading of the books in the companion
series.
This series follows the endlessly-fascinating shapeshifting
Others. Some can shift between human and animal. Some can
shift into smoke and drink blood a la vampires. And some are
more elemental, like the embodiment of fire or tornados. I
think much of my enjoyment of this series is how truly OTHER
these beings are. I'm always in awe of how the author makes
them feel so viscerally foreign. Like how they casually
mention eating humans. Chills down my spine! It's fun, too,
how humans are the bad guys here. Granted, there are good
humans. But the vast majority of homo sapiens deserve every
bad thing that happens to them, because they are greedy,
malicious jerks. It's so satisfying when they get their
comeuppance.
Humans recently tried to wipe out The Others, and got
smacked down violently for it. After the annihilation, some
small towns are being repopulated by selected humans and
Others. Bennett is a small and remote town surrounded by
wild country, where an intentional community is being set up
to allow species to interact and live together. There's a
human deputy, Jana, brought in to work under the Wolfgard
sheriff. There's a vampiric guy based in Bennett whose job
it is to help govern, and he injects some entertaining
dispassion into the mix. There's such a charming diversity
of characters to enjoy in Bennett and the connected towns.
There's a snake introduced to the garden of Eden, however,
who is (you guessed it) human.
Bishop continues to delight with this powerful and engaging
fantasy world. WILD COUNTRY feels fresh and captivating.
While I still miss Meg and Simon being the center of the
Others storytelling universe, because they're my favorites,
Jana is a great human "ingénue," naïve of interacting with
the Others, who makes a great foil for all the good guys
with fangs and claws in this book. As always with Bishop
books, WILD COUNTRY is going on my keeper shelf, and will
come out for periodic re-readings as I revel in the
masterful paranormal world she's built.
In this powerful and exciting fantasy set in the world of
the New York Times bestselling Others series, humans
and the shape-shifting Others will see whether they can live
side by side...without destroying one another.
There are ghost towns in the world—places where the humans
were annihilated in retaliation for the slaughter of the
shape-shifting Others.
One of those places is Bennett, a town at the northern end
of the Elder Hills—a town surrounded by the wild country.
Now efforts are being made to resettle Bennett as a
community where humans and Others live and work together. A
young female police officer has been hired as the deputy to
a Wolfgard sheriff. A deadly type of Other wants to run a
human-style saloon. And a couple with four foster
children—one of whom is a blood prophet—hope to find acceptance.
But as they reopen the stores and the professional offices
and start to make lives for themselves, the town of Bennett
attracts the attention of other humans looking for profit.
And the arrival of the outlaw Blackstone Clan will either
unite Others and humans...or bury them all.
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