“STAY AWAY FROM ALMANBY.

Almanby is dangerous.

Go anywhere, but don’t go to Almanby.

But no one ever specified why. No one thought to impress upon the children exactly what terrible fate would befall them if they did happen to venture across its threshold. It was likely no one actually had any idea. It was simply a fact: Almanby was dangerous. Everyone knew it, even if they couldn’t remember how they knew. But there was certainly no need to question it or look into it any further. All anyone was really sure of was that if you went to Almanby, you’d never come back.”

Adam S. Leslie’s debut novel Lost In The Garden (2024) is a psychedelic folk horror masterpiece. Somewhere in between The Wicker Man (1973) and Jeff VanderMeer’s Area X books (2014), Lost In The Garden is a haunting, hallucinatory road trip through the fields and backroads of England to the heart of the uncanny. Leslie’s writing is lyrically inventive, deeply unsettling and frequently very funny; his vividly drawn characters just the right side of quirky. Leslie’s world is overflowing with hauntological strangeness, a lost 1970s TV horror show soundtracked by the buzz of shortwave radio and TV static, an endless childhood from which there is no escape. The novel paints a swirling symphony of the strange, building to an unpredictable climax whilst keeping the reader invested in the human interactions of its characters. Strange, imaginative and hugely compelling, Lost In The Garden is destined to be a cult classic.

Lost In The Garden is set in a dreamy alternate Britain where it is always summer, all the adults have disappeared, and corporeal ghosts infest the streets to feed on unwary victims. Heather, Rachel and Steven are the sole surviving members of the Chicken Club, until Steven decides he has to go to Almanby, the sinister village that they have been warned not to go to ever since they were children. Heather is in love with Steven, and hears his voice from Almanby manifesting on the shortwave radio, so when Rachel says she needs to travel to Almanby to deliver a secret package, Heather jumps at the chance. They coerce their old school friend Antonia, failed standup comedian with an unrequited crush on Heather, to drive them. Antonia agrees against her better judgement for the chance of spending a day with Heather. Soon all three of them are on their way to forbidden Almanby, in a surreal road trip across a transfigured England. As they get closer to Almanby, the sheer strangeness of the place causes reality to warp and buckle around them, and as trust diminishes and paranoia rises it soon becomes clear that all three of them have something to hide from the others.

Lost In The Garden operates in the tradition of Jeff VanderMeer’s Area X books, or the Strugatskies’ classic Roadside Picnic (1972) and its obliquely filmed Tarkovsky adaptation STALKER (1979), in which characters travel into a mysterious otherland where the normal rules of reality don’t apply, causing them in turn to become transfigured. Leslie’s take on it is easily striking and original enough to stand up to its precursors. He brings a very English folk horror sensibility to the story, informed by films like The Wickerman and TV serials like Children Of The Stones (1977), stories that imagine an uncanny underbelly to straightlaced English society thriving in the countryside. Also present in the book’s DNA are the catastrophe novels of John Wyndham, novels like The Day Of The Triffids (1951) that imagine nature turning against humanity. This thread is certainly present in Lost In The Garden, where the garden of England, liberated by the catastrophe that has caused everyone to disappear and the dead to walk, is rebelling against its manicured constraints and claiming back the land for itself. But there’s something uniquely modern about Lost In The Garden, despite being set in a hauntological 1970s that never ended. Its feelings of a never-ending season, a perpetual state of suspension in which the figures of authority have faded away leaving the kids to fend for themselves, the associated sense of a complete dislocation from the regular course of history, find echoes in the feelings of alienation and fear caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. The mistrust of our own environment taps into our current anxieties around climate change.

Lost In The Garden, for all its reveling in the strange and the uncanny, is nevertheless a deeply enjoyable and frequently very amusing book. Leslie’s command of character is admirable. From Heather, who is living her manic pixie dreamgirl schtick to attract Steven but underneath is just as terrified as everyone else, to Antonia, a lonely queer girl stuck in a small town that doesn’t understand her, to the complexly manipulative Rachel, the three leads are wonderfully drawn and each have their own distinctive voice. Much of the novel is told through their banter and bickering in the car ride to Almanby, their desires and fears betrayed by their dialogue even while they joke and argue. The dialogue really sparkles, and makes hanging out with the characters lots of fun. This in turn makes us more invested in their fate when the weirdness of Almanby starts to catch up with them. 

Leslie’s joyride to Almanby takes us through a series of increasingly surprising twists and turns, building to a genuinely surprising climax. The novel is long but never feels bloated or gratuitous, and there are several wonderfully inventive set pieces that Leslie deploys with admirable aplomb. Leslie is also a master of place and atmosphere – Almanby is a palpable presence in the book, almost a character in and of itself, with a texture you can almost reach out and touch. Vivid, hallucinogenic and unforgettable, Lost In The Garden is a triumph of the Weird. It’s surely one of the literary highlights of the year so far, and I can’t wait to see what Leslie does next. 

Lost in the Garden is available now. You can order your copy HERE