Campaign for the American Reader: Pg. 69: "The Wildfire Season"

The Wildfire Season is Andrew Pyper's third novel.

His first novel, Lost Girls, was a national bestseller in Canada and a Notable Book selection of the New York Times Book Review (2000). His second novel, The Trade Mission, was selected by the Toronto Star as one of the Ten Best Books of the Year.

I asked Andrew to apply the "page 69 test" to The Wildfire Season. Here is his reply:

A reviewer recently called The Wildfire Season an “emo-thriller,” a play on the more established sub-category of eco-thriller, but here the “emo” standing for “emotional.” Although the very questions of classification and the lines drawn between so-called commercial vs. so-called literary fiction bring on a dull ache behind my eyeballs, I can live with emo-thriller. In all of my books – each of them distinct in setting and character and plot – my fundamental intent is to viscerally engage through story, the compulsive pull of the what-happens-next (the thrilling part of a thriller, I suppose). I want to achieve this, but not only this. There is always a second heart beating in my novels, a subtler rhythm, whether it be the difference between legal justice and moral good (Lost Girls), defining the “real” in a virtual age (The Trade Mission), or, in The Wildfire Season, the possibility of redemption through action, the test of how we react in a moment of crisis that will mark us for the rest of our lives. A love story, in other words.

Page 69 of The Wildfire Season isn’t such a moment, but it starts us toward one. The scene finds Miles, the chief of an under-qualified firefighting team in a forgotten, booze-sodden town in the middle of the Yukon where he has been hiding from the world, paying an awkward visit to the motel room of Alex, his long-ago ex-girlfriend who has tracked him down – and Rachel, a five-year-old girl he has never met before. His daughter.

It is this painful and seemingly hopeless family reunion that shocks the second heart of the novel to life – the emo of this emo-thriller. For when, later, an uncontrollable forest fire surrounds the town, and Alex and Rachel are trapped in the eye of the storm, Miles must embark on an impossible, Odysseus-like journey through an underworld of flame and back again. It is a test of action through which he might prove his potential for becoming human again, or put another way, his worthiness to the unexpected gift of love.

Many thanks to Andrew for the input.

Read an excerpt from The Wildfire Season.

Among the praise for The Wildfire Season:

"Lost Girls was one of the most stunning debuts I've read: literate, scary, haunting. Now, with The Wildfire Season, Andrew Pyper has solidified that marvelous potential. A novel of true haunting loneliness and isolation, plus a gripping story that scorches off the page.

This novel of extraordinary power combines the supernatural, edge of your seat suspense, nature in all its wondrous ferocity, and scars--visible and invisible. The writing is a dream, demonstrating that indeed, the past can kill. This is a novel that blazes with all the ingredients of the best literature."
--Ken Bruen, author of The Guards and The Magdalen Martyrs

"Outstanding...Pyper's pacing is impeccable. A captivating book."
--London Evening Standard (U.K.)

"Stampeding narrative urgency... A fierce morality tale."
--New York Times

"Andrew Pyper has talent galore and sure hands, ratcheting up the suspense to the very end."
--Stewart O'Nan, author of The Good Wife