If you like my work, buy me a virtual cup of coffee at Ko-Fi.

I found out about the SciFi/Mystery novel Pines by Blake Crouch when I was looking up something totally unrelated. I had watched (again) the pilot episode to the 1966 Irwin Allen TV show The Time Tunnel and was wondering why the government would want to invent time travel.

Time travel, contrary to popular fiction, isn’t easily weaponized. If you want to change the past and say prevent anyone else besides the U.S. acquiring nuclear weapons, it would be incredibly complicated. Unforeseen variables could cause all kinds of unanticipated results, assuming you could change your own timeline at all.

It gets complex and it’s not the focus of this review. In one article I read, Blake Crouch said that changing time would most likely not be possible. If you tried to, as in the Back to the Future movies, prevent Marty’s Mom and Dad from meeting in 1955 so they couldn’t get married and ‘make” Marty, time would find another way for them to get together and sustain history.

I became curious about Crouch and looked up his books, finding the Wayward Pines novel series. My local library had a copy of “Pines,” so I checked it out.

In 2012, the year the book was published, Secret Service Agent Ethan Burke wakes up by a river at the edge of the small community of Wayward Pines, Idaho. He’s hurt, apparently from an accident, and is suffering from total amnesia. Wandering into town, he tries to find out what has happened. The only name he can remember is “Mack” and he goes seeking anyone in town who knows if “Mack” hurt him.

His experiences over the next few days are surreal to say the least. The other agent who was traveling with him to Wayward Pines, on a mission to find two other missing agents, is supposedly killed. Ethan either can’t get an outside phone line or can’t remember phone numbers. The hospital and local Sheriff give him the runaround about where his belongings are, including his iPhone. He manages to talk some locals into giving him a hotel room for the night and a meal but not much else.

A co-conspirator named Beverly gives Ethan her home address, but when he gets there, it’s a rundown shack. Inside is the tortured and mutilated corpse of one of the missing agents. When he tries to report it to Sheriff Pope, Pope is initially interested and later accuses Burke of being the killer.

Burke encounters the other agent, a woman with whom he previously had an extramarital affair, but she’s twenty years older than she should be, and says if she talks to him, both their lives would be put in danger.

After other misadventures, Burke finds himself back in the hospital, accused of being insane by a local psychiatrist and scheduled for an unknown surgery. He’s rescued by the mysterious Beverly again and while hiding out in a cemetery, she tells him she came to Wayward Pines a year ago as a salesperson…in 1985. This should be impossible and Burke doesn’t know why she would lie about it.

She does help him get rid of a tracker embedded in his leg. Oh, this triggers a series of flashbacks of how he was captured and tortured by the enemy as a soldier in the second Gulf War. Several times in the book, the town residents engineer situations that will recall this torture in an effort to make him think he’s insane.

At night, the entire town, literally hundreds of people including children, come looking for them. They separate and Burke narrowly escapes detection, well, that’s after killing two people. Beverly isn’t so lucky and she’s brutally murdered in the town square while Burke watches helplessly from a third floor apartment nearby.

He escapes town, reaching the tall electric fence at the city limits. The town is surrounded on three sides by tall, almost unclimbable cliffs and the fence seals the fourth side. Burke manages to climb over the fence on the cliff face and enters the wilderness. But there’s a pack of unknown, barely humanoid creatures trailing him. He kills one on the ground and then tries to escape the others by climbing a cliff. High on the cliff is a large, reflective surface and he tries for that.

After killing other creatures chasing him, he manages to worm his way inside the air shaft behind the metal surface he saw, entering a vast underground complex. There he finds some but not all of the answers, not until he confronts the psychiatrist who, in fact, is Dr. Pilcher, the brilliant billionaire who created Wayward Pines for his own purposes.

I’ll leave the mystery there, although I discovered what it was ahead of time by inadvertently looking up the Wayward Pines television series.

Oh, I should say that Burke’s wife and young son are seen commemorating Burke’s “death” a year after his disappearance, and early the next morning, they are kidnapped by a man claiming Burke is still alive. We see Theresa Burke in Wayward Pines during the time when her husband is being pursued by the town, but she’s five or six years older as it their son.

I mentioned the fictional town of Wayward Pines is in Idaho. According to various clues in the book, it’s about 40 miles northeast of the very real town of Lowman, Idaho, just off of Highway 21. I’ve never been there, but the fake town should be at the most northern point Hwy 21 makes before turning south again toward Stanley.

Since the circumstances of Wayward Pines don’t require the Sheriff, doctors, or nurses to act as you’d expect them to, I concentrated on Burke. He’s a Secret Service agent, and the service is interested in some of the shady business dealings of the aforementioned billionaire.

Burke was an Army helicopter pilot, captured and viciously tortured by the enemy and fortunately rescued by Navy SEALS before he is killed. Given the severity of his experiences, he should certainly suffer from PTSD, and yet when questioned by “the psychiatrist,” he denies any history of psychiatric illness.

I don’t know what the qualifications are for becoming a Secret Service agent, but you’d think someone as traumatized as Burke might not be admitted. Even his wife says after he returned from the war, that he never really came back at all.

At least three times in the book, Burke is either half dressed or completely nude. I suppose this could be to heighten his sense of vulnerability, but there were occasions when he could have gotten dressed and probably should have given he was on the run.

He survives not only terrible torture as a prisoner of war, but multiple physical attacks that would put and keep most of us in intensive care. We certainly wouldn’t be moving over unknown terrain in the dark, evading bloodthirsty characters.

At the end, when Burke agrees to cooperate with Dr. Pilcher in running Wayward Pines, he seems to forget that literally the entire town went crazy on multiple occasions, chasing down and murdering people in the most ghastly manner possible. And yet at all other times, these people behave like caring, innocent small town inhabitants, supposedly living out the idyllic dream.

No sort of mind control is involved beyond the threat of violence happening to them if they get out of line, but Burke doesn’t even request that these attacks against people rebelling from the town’s “dream” be more humanly dealt with (suspended animation is involved, so you could just capture such people and put them back under).

Supposedly, after climate change and various other environmental disasters have turned the Earth into a poisonous nightmare, people evolve into these feral, murderous creatures everywhere except inside Wayward Pines. The book says that people were about to go extinct anyway and this “creature” was the only adaptation that could survive the toxic planet. Yet less than two-thousand years later, we see the environment, air, water, everything, is clean and fresh, perfectly acceptable for human habitation. Why couldn’t other humans have survived and why “evolve” at all?

On the social justice scale, there doesn’t appear to be any overt representation. Race is never brought up except in the context of Burke’s middle eastern torturer whose mother was white/British.

Nothing else we typically see in fictional works “updated for modern audiences” smacked me in the face like a wet mackerel or even nibbled around the edges of my toes, metaphorically speaking.

In the Afterword, Crouch said that as a child, he had a fascination for the television show Twin Peaks. It was the partial reason he became a writer and a major influence in writing this book. He humbly admits it’s not as good as the Mark Forst/David Lynch masterpiece (I’ve never seen it myself), but it’s definitely a homage to tales where a small rural village is not what it seems.

The book is an easy and quick read. It’s action packed, as the saying goes, with Burke not getting hardly a minute’s rest unless he’s drugged or in handcuffed.

The early sequence involving his wife and son in Seattle were a bit unnerving, if only because I had no idea how it would be relevant to Burke’s adventures, but it makes sense later on.

I’m not convinced that Burke is going to truly accept his role in Wayward Pines. He has to keep a lid on a horrendous secret, one which probably causes more problems than it solves. Remember, the other agent, although older, is still a town resident, and his wife Theresa knows what Burke knows. The two sequels probably deal with some of this, but Pilcher is a fool if he thinks Burke will become just another of his pawns.

If you like mysteries, the macabre, and occasionally ultra-violence, this is the book for you. If you need “trigger warnings,” you might want to give it a pass.