In the spirit of Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror and The Outer Limits comes Weeping Season by Seán O’Connor –A unsettling, suspenseful chiller that leaves you gasping for breath… A group of strangers wake up in a cold isolated forest with no memory of anything before their arrival. Lost, hungry and wandering aimlessly, they are summoned to a campsite by a remote entity who controls their fate … entity who controls their fate through a series of tortuous objectives. Their only hope for survival is either escape from the psychological game reserve, known as Block 18, or face mortality at the hands of its maniacal moderator, who loves nothing more than watch his participants suffer.
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A man and a woman wake up in the woods, chained to trees. They don’t know where they are, how they got there, or even who they are. Strangers, they are only identifiable to each other by the fresh tattoo inked into their recently shaved scalps. He is Seven, she is Eight. There are others like them in the woods, and they must band together in order to survive against the deadly challenges they are forced to endure by the mysterious entity known only as The Host, watching and listening to them via cameras placed all throughout the pine forest they are lost in.
Weeping Season initially plays a bit like a horror version of the prisoner’s dilemma that evolves into a perilous game of Would You Rather? in its opening moments. Would you rather you and your tribe go without food for a while, or have three fingers cut off? And how does a kidnapped group of kept-in-the-dark survivors forced to trust one another (or not) reach a consensus as a group? Sean O’Connor puts a good deal of thought into the group dynamics here, raising all sorts of questions along the way about both his cast of characters and the deadly Host who has gathered them together for his/her/its own entertainment.
As the paranoia builds, and their individual fears become central to the various challenges they are dropped into, the characters begin to take drastic actions in order to not just survive, but win. Even if they don’t know exactly what winning this game entails. O’Connor keeps both his cast and his readers in the dark damn near the whole way through, but he does leave some interesting nuggets of information to keep you guessing about the central mysteries here — who is The Host, and what is this section of woods called Block 18 all about?
Weeping Season plays out like an odd-duck hybrid of Saw and TV’s LOST, featuring plenty of puzzles, questionable motives, and some grisly action along the way. I won’t dare spoil the big reveal, but it does post some interesting food for thought in its own right and it feels like a logical and honest conclusion given the information that came beforehand (unlike, say, the disappointing and vastly overhyped The Girl on the Porch). It also paints what came before in a new light, which should give the re-readers among us an interesting perspective on this story as they navigate it a second time through. O’Connor takes a risk with his ending, but he planted enough seeds along the way to earn our trust with his smart gamble. Frankly, I wasn’t sure there would be a resolution satisfying enough for the brisk and horrific mystery O’Connor was leading toward, but happily I was wrong.
“A man awoke to hysterical screams.”
Last year I had the pleasure of reading ‘The Mongrel’ by O’Connor, which at that time I raved about. It still is one of the best survival tales I’ve read, but one such issue I had was I felt that the werewolf aspect was tossed in, simply to make it a werewolf story. The book would have stood on its own merits even if it had just been a battle against the elements to survive.
‘Weeping Season’ doesn’t suffer from any throw in’s. From word one on page one, O’Connor decides to crush our faces with desperation and horrific events and it works to the nth degree.
I’ve seen this described as a Black Mirror type book, but to be frank, I couldn’t tell you, as I’ve never watched an episode.
From where my experience sits – this was a full-on barrage of ‘Hunger Games’-meets ‘Maze Runner’ – meets ‘Saw’ – meets ‘Survivor’ – meets ‘Siberia.’
That’s as close as I can get a TV/movie comparison. I found a lot of the book reminded me of the show Siberia, which sadly only had one season. A random group of people are brought into the middle of nowhere and have tasks to complete to get rewards. The last one standing and surviving wins.
In Weeping Season though, O’Connor lets us know early and often that the chances of survival aren’t very good.
I absolutely loved the task elements and the idea of each contestant having to confront their extreme fears dead on.
The further along in the book I went the more and more I wanted to know the back story or the behind the scenes stuff that was playing out, so after finishing this, I hope O’Connor treats us to another book where it’s from the antagonists viewpoint. I can’t say much more about that as I don’t want to get into spoiler territory.
Lastly – I just wanted to touch on the ending. There is a ‘twist’ ending to this book and personally, for me, it didn’t really work, at least for what I wanted. I really dug the twist but felt it almost would’ve been served better in a different story. It wasn’t enough to derail the book or anything like that, and the ‘resolution’ for one of the characters was darkly fascinating, but I wasn’t wanting such a jarring 360-degree change.
Well done to O’Connor with ‘Weeping Season.’ I raved about his gift of prose and his ability to captivate his readers and he delivers again, showing he is easily one of the many up-and-coming dark fiction writers to keep an eye on.