Adam S. Leslie, you’ve written quite a book.
Lost in the Garden is like a dream I had and forgot, and then Leslie went and excavated it. I don’t know how he did it, but this is whimsy without twee. It explodes the manic pixie dream girl trope without doing harm to the eponymous girl: instead, it invites her into a landscape and genre far more suited to her, something like a cross between Midsommar and Annihilation.
It’s not quite Weird Horror, though, or even Folk Horror. If anything, it’s its own category—Whimsical Horror. It has the kind of sun-drenched spookiness that are all the worse for being well lit, but I wasn’t often scared. Unnerved, maybe, but there aren’t gross-out scenes or many shocks. This is a wild unraveling, one that feels like following the skein through the labyrinth. It’s as thrilling to find the way through as it is to come undone.
What happens when a manic pixie dream girl goes up against actual pixies?
The book is on the longer side and sometimes might seem to meander, but two equally important facts kept me engrossed: I genuinely did not know what was going to happen next, but I had the absolute faith that Leslie knew. Despite its dreamlike passages, despite the seeming randomness of both events and characters’ choices, there is an undeniable and even relentless logic to this book. It has hints of Alan Garner, but instead childhood nostalgia, it has a distinctly modern feel.
Well, mostly modern. Modern by way of the apocalypse, which was slow-moving and not all that cataclysmic, in the end. Sure, the dead have returned to menace the living, but there’s still take-out pizza and weekly stand-up comedy. Instead of curiosity or desperation, there’s little more than ennui. Oh, the dead are back? Well, best to avoid them.
Unless you’re a bored twentysomething looking for a thrill. That’s the Chicken Club, and that’s especially Heather, the most daring, darling little pixie ever to pull a prank. The club also includes her boyfriend, Stephen, and her BFF Rachel, and several other members. Or…it did, until people started to disappear. First one, then another, until finally Stephen told Heather that he was going to Almanby, and he’d be back in a few days.
When the story begins, it’s been six months.
A not-that-unlikely trio for a road trip forms: Heather, who wants to rescue her boyfriend, Rachel, who needs to deliver a mysterious package to the village of Almanby, and Antonia, who has a car and a massive unrequited crush on Heather. All three of them know or know of each other, and more importantly, they know the old adage: don’t go to Almanby.
Nobody knows where the warning started; they don’t even really know where Almanby is. But they do know that nobody ever comes back.
In the post-apocalypse, though, disappearances are getting more common all the time. And sometimes, it’s not disappearing that’s worse. After all, the trio knows exactly what happened to that old couple living nearby, or to Heather’s father. They’re all ghosts.
Er, sort of. Actually, they’re more like zombies, but not your typical zombies (if zombies can be typical after all the variations we’ve had). Yes, they bumble and stare, getting up to nothing-in-particular until humans linger too long in their vicinity. Once activated, they will try to destroy the living, but crucially, they aren’t trying to eat anyone. Nor are they infectious.
They’re also very well dressed.
The dead come back in casket attire, dull suits and separates regardless of what they wore in life. That’s the first detail that really edges into the ghost territory. They also don’t rot. I’d say the taxonomy isn’t important, except that it’s another way that Leslie finds to undermine our expectations of both genre and narrative. These undead are the half-dreamed amalgams of ghost and zombie, as unsure of themselves as the living/waking are.
Lost in the Garden excels at this kind of destabilization across the board. The road trip, also a kind of sub-genre, devolves from the wacky rest stops that serve as opportunities for character interaction and growth, and start getting strange. The landscape changes around them, arranging itself with odd linearity to point directly toward Almanby. Their radio starts broadcasting daydreams they once had, except that they all seem to feature a strange man in the background, or a girl with blue eyes and red shoes.
The three roadtrippers keep this story grounded even as it becomes increasingly phantasmagorical. They’re unlikely friends, and the interplay of their personalities reveals increasing nuance to each character. Especially Heather, who seems to be—and is—the ultimate manic pixie dream girl. She’ll dare you to go walking around barefoot, or go for a sudden swim! What a magically fulfilled life you’d lead, if only you followed her live-in-the-moment example!

Neither Antonia nor Rachel do, though. This isn’t a dizzy little jaunt of self-discovery, this is a quest, and even lovesick Antonia can’t really bring herself to be swayed by Heather’s antics.
But that doesn’t matter to Heather, in the end, because Heather’s personality isn’t just there to advance another character’s development. She’s a POV character, and her perspective and motivations get to matter for their own sake. Rather than critique the trope or the character, Leslie takes Heather very seriously. And that produces some very interesting questions, it turns out: when you live in the moment, do you start to forget the past and the future? Do you start to lose yourself? And what about magic—if it’s real, isn’t there always a price to pay?
As Lost in the Garden winds toward its conclusion, it seems that the price for the trio of friends is going to be very high indeed. Because what’s waiting in Almanby is strange and sinister, another kind of ghost from a very far distant past. What happens when a manic pixie dream girl goes up against actual pixies?
That’s another question that Leslie takes seriously, even though it could be quite flippant. Fairies have always been very ambiguous, ambivalent creatures. To involve them with the dead, and with the end of the world, takes a wild and brave imagination, and that’s something Leslie has in spades.
Lost in the Garden is currently published in the UK, but international readers can get a copy from, among other places, Blackwell’s, where the author happens to work!