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Meh. A bunch of different characters like a former mafia hitman, a divorced wife and her bright daughter, a bunch of neopagan villagers, and a mysterious wild girl all live in the wilds of Canada. They all are touched by a gigantic stag as the past of several of them come to a violent head.

It starts out well, but then drags on. I'm sure for the time the neo-paganism was groundbreaking, but it feels really tired and cliche here, especially the typical "Christianity is bad m'kay" vibe. I'm not against the idea of functioning paganism in fantasy, but a good book doesn't greenwash it: it acknowledges that the deity itself is not perfect. A good example in modern film is Miyazaki's Princess Mononoke, with the wolf-goddess Moro. She is wild, pagan, capricious, but tender and long-lived. This just felt very one-sided a book to me, especially when they revealed the dogs chasing the stag.

The plot is okay, but after awhile I was just wishing they'd get to the resolution. The pagan aspect was straightforwards and displayed early, so it's just a lot of waiting for Earl vs Tony or what have you. Surprisingly I found myself differing from the reviewers here, and I would have loved it just being a story about Tony, Frankie, and Ali discovering a wild pagan god in their forest. The rest of the characters or subplots honestly felt redundant, and those characters to me were the only ones that mattered. The neopagan village especially was a dumb idea, as it robbed a lot of the mystery of the book. I'll still try later books, but this one isn't really selling me on the author.