WILDLORD

An orphaned boy has a chance to spend the school holidays with an unknown and sinister relative.

Seventeen-year-old Tom can’t bear the thought of spending the next eight weeks of summer holidays under surveillance at his boarding school, but his parents have been dead for five years, and his friends are too busy to host him. An unexpected letter from his Uncle Jack offers a reprieve: a chance to stay in the country. But Tom doesn’t even have an uncle, does he? Mundham Farm, Jack’s village home, proves to be deeply unsettling: Tom gets no cellphone reception, and all household work is done by two “domestics” who dress oddly and speak in archaic language. Is Jack magic? Worse, is Jack actually 500 years old? In this strange, remote house that appears to be under siege by arrow-shooting Good Folk, Jack’s creepy magic seems to come out of a grab bag of tropes, and the slow-moving, fragmented prose contributes to an overall feeling of disconnectedness. The servants’ inner lives are limited to recitations of backstory and expressions of fear or rage; when a tear-faced Tom insists that he loves them, it’s not clear what’s possibly passed between the characters to inspire such strong emotion. Most characters, human or otherwise, appear to be White.

The plodding pace and surface-level characterizations make this a hard sell.