Pines

Hello tie-in cover!

Ethan Burke, Gulf War veteran and Secret Service agent wakes on the road into the small town of Wayward Pines, Idaho, with no wallet or ID. He dimly recalls an accident, a truck hitting his car and killing his partner. He remembers that he was looking for two other missing agents. And he can not get out of Wayward Pines, a town which seems too perfect to be true.

Pines is the first book in the Wayward Pines trilogy (now adapted as a 'major television event' as the tie in cover informs me excitedly) and lays out a surprising number of its cards by the end of its relatively short length: What the deal with the town is, who is behind it; all revealed by the final page, so the following books are presumably going to be very different, and it's kind of a shame. Pines is a deliberate tribute to Twin Peaks, and although more SF at heart, has a vein of almost Lovecraftian horror running through it, with its road that leads back on itself, the eerie perfection of the town and its brutal and macabre immune response.

It's on the level of weird fiction that Pines works best, and the high concept but ultimately mundane reveal at the end was actually a slight disappointment, for me at least. That said, I think there's enough potential to look into the other books in the series, but I'm going to miss the weirdness.