Rainforest | review by Rafe McGregor

 

Rainforest by Michelle Paver

Orion Books, hardback, £20.00, October 2025, ISBN 9781398723207 

 

Michelle Paver is an Oxford educated British author best known for her Chronicles of Ancient Darkness, a children’s fantasy series of nine books that began with Wolf Brother in 2004 and concluded with Wolfbane in 2022. The novels are aimed at children from the ages of nine to thirteen, have been translated into thirty languages, and have sold over two and a half million copies. Paver has also published Daughters of Eden, an historical trilogy; Gods and Warriors, an historical series for children; and five standalone novels. All of her published work is historical in setting, albeit varying dramatically, from six thousand to one hundred years in the past. Among her standalone novels, three are horror stories: Dark Matter (2010), which is set in the Arctic in 1928; Thin Air (2016), set in the Himalayas in 1935; and Wakenhyrst (2019), set in the fens of Edwardian Suffolk. Dark Matter and Thin Air are two of the best horror novels (or, more accurately, novellas) I have ever read. Until reading Dark Matter shortly after it was published, I’d considered James Buchan’s The Gate of Air: A Ghost Story (2008) my favourite contemporary horror story, but unlike the latter, Dark Matter and Thin Air have rewarded repeated readings. Wakenhyrst is longer than its predecessors and of a similar quality, although I found it harder going, which is because of my indifference to the haunted house trope rather than because of any flaws. (I must confess that even Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House and Richard Matheson’s Hell House leave me cold…and I’m not referring to my spine.)

Rainforest is Paver’s twenty-third novel, sixth standalone novel, and fourth horror novel. It also completes an informal trilogy with Dark Matter and Thin Air, all of whom are about and narrated by well educated, old fashioned British men who have difficulty socialising and lead conflicted inner lives. Writing with and in the voice of another gender is, I think, very difficult and Paver is one of the few authors to succeed completely. All three novellas (Rainforest is longer than the other two, but still a novella) read exactly as if they’d been written by the protagonists Paver has presented with such and competence and conviction and all three are men we wouldn’t want to spend much time with, but whose lives are nonetheless captivating and compelling. The three novellas also demonstrate an enviable expertise in representing the experiences of living and working in inhospitable environments – whether icy in temperature, high in altitude, or crushing in humidity – without resorting to lengthy exposition. Rainforest is, as the title suggests, set in the Mexican rainforest, very likely the Lacandon Jungle, which was part of the Maya civilisation in the preclassic period, in 1973. Dr Simon Corbett is a forty-two-year-old entomologist from Cambridge who specialises in the predation of mantids or Mantidae (praying mantises). When we meet him, he is recovering from a mental health crisis connected to the death of a woman named Penelope and en route to an archaeological dig in the jungle, where he hopes to both recover his equilibrium and resurrect a stalled academic career.

Corbett has been advised to keep a journal by his doctor and that journal is what constitutes the majority of the novella. Penelope was, it appears, Corbett’s first girlfriend, which is the first suggestion of how much of a misfit he is (their relationship and her death both being recent). He also disapproves of the cultural, social, and political changes of the preceding decade, dislikes the Indigenous People of Mexico (a typically baseless and irrational racism), and is frightened and disgusted by their ancient and contemporary rituals of self-mutilation. Paver is often compared to M.R. James and while there is definitely a ‘Jamesian’ atmosphere to and in her horror, there is also a ‘Lovecraftian’ scope and more accurate description is that she combines the virtues of both masters of the weird tale with a contemporary sensibility and sensitivity in a way that may well be unique. The plot of Rainforest is driven by the subtle integration of two narratives. The first is in the present and follows Corbett’s journey to the camp, tensions with both his British and Mexican coworkers, and his unsuccessful search for mantids. While these events are unfolding, he also becomes more open about his past with Penelope, revisiting and revising what he has previously revealed. Penelope, it turns out, was an acquaintance not a lover and her death in a car crash occurred in the course of her flight from Corbett. He is, indeed, a stalker, who became obsessed with her after a single, short dinner date and who was the recipient of a lawyer’s letter and a police caution. The pull and push between present and past, effect and cause, representation and reality retrospectively infuses previous passages with new (and sinister) meaning while heightening the narrative tension. To take just three examples, the novella opens with Corbett fondling something he calls his ‘talisman’. I’ll avoid spoilers by not revealing precisely what it is, suffice to say that the object seems to be a bizarre but harmless keepsake. Similarly, his entomology seems to be a relatively insignificant part of his personality, perhaps even a narrative device to bring him to the jungle, but his expertise in mantid predation is no contingency. Finally, Corbett's reaction to an illustration in a book seems either absurd, tangential to the plot, or both, but is a crucial component of the narrative crisis.

While Rainforest is neither didactic nor even a case of the ‘instructing by pleasing’ tradition of literature, it does explore a theme that is relevant to and resonates with everyday life in the twenty-first century. The novella explores this theme in a singular and inventive way and simultaneously reinvents the ghost story as an aesthetic form. First, Paver asks us to reconceive or at least reconsider ghosts as stalkers. Not stalkers in terms of the denotation of the word, the hunting of humans or animals by other humans or animals, but in the legal connotation of men stalking women with whom they have become obsessed. Regardless of whether they were perpetrators or victims, ghosts are dead things that are obsessed with an aspect of their animate lives – either with the places where they lived or died or with people whom they despised or loved. Like the stalker, the ghost is an unwelcome and uninvited presence that disturbs and disrupts the mental (and sometimes physical) wellbeing of the person it haunts or of the people who enter the place it haunts. Aside from and in addition to the richness of this thematic exploration of what ghosts are, Paver reverses or inverts the traditional ghost story in and with Rainforest, presenting her readers with a (living) person stalking a (dead) ghost. Where one might expect Penelope to stalk Corbett from beyond the grave in revenge, it is Corbett’s pathological fixation that fails to recognise death as an impediment. As he stalked her in life, so he continues to stalk her in death, deluding himself that he is driven by guilt rather than accepting his predatory desire to possess her against her will. I can’t recommend this book enough. If you haven’t yet discovered the pleasures of Paver, follow up with Thin Air, Dark Matter…and Wakenhyrst too.