Gray After Dark is a horror story about a jogger in the Frank Church Wilderness who is kidnapped by insane, Christian-y preppers. (#notallpreppers #notevenmostpreppers #actuallyprobablyjustoneortwo #notanyChristians #butstill)

The preppers are a father, Fred, (certifiable abuser) and grown son, Hamish, (brainwashed and cowed) who take advantage of female hikers to “tame” them and make them their “wives.” They don’t just prep like normal people, gardening, learning basic gun safety, having a backup generator, keeping chickens, etc. Instead, the live completely off the grid, in a shack way out in the middle of nowhere, and like the Ingalls family, they live on game and cornbread. They think they will be glad of all this when the SHTF.

But weirdly, Fred isn’t even that capable as a prepper. He will shoot a moose or deer and then just leave it. No real hunter would do that. He doesn’t bother to bathe himself, or allow the other members of his household to fulfill basic hygiene. For example, they have to sneak around behind his back in order to wash their hands before handling food supplies. Again, any capable off-gridder would know how important cleanliness is to avoid getting sick. And, of course, Fred also damages and endangers his own project by treating the two women in his household in a way that most capable hunters wouldn’t even treat their dogs. This is just part of his overall M.O. of shooting himself in the foot (metaphorically) by not having any control over his large collection of besetting sins. “He who loves his wife, loves himself” (Ephesians 5:28) is a Bible verse that Fred has apparently never come across.

The family has a shed on their property where they keep their food supplies: gobs of “white plastic gallon buckets.” (I assume Ihli means 5-gallon buckets or bigger, because gallon buckets are awfully small for storing bulk food supplies, but anyway.) In some of these buckets is flour. In others there are wheat berries. Where did these supplies come from? They must have been bought at some point, because Fred and Hamish clearly aren’t farmers. But that is never explained. Plastic food-storage buckets are designed to keep pests out, yet somehow, the flour has become infested with weevils. This is just one of a number of examples where the descriptions of the preppers’ lifestyle makes me scratch my head. To be fair, I have never survived off grid, so I don’t know enough about it to say that all this could not happen. (And bugs somehow made their way into plastic flour-storage bins when I lived in Indonesia.) But, I do get the vibe that Ihli is in the same boat as me when it comes to survival knowledge. Her conception of these particular preppers is that they live in ignorance and squalor.

As mentioned, Fred also does not appear to be a capable Christian cult leader (if that is what the book is going for). There are, indeed, horrific Christianity-adjacent cults where women are kept prisoner with a variety of brainwashing tactics, but these cults tend to use actual ceremonies, harangues, and Bible passages (though twisted). Fred is never shown reading anything (although he’s not stupid). “Mary,” the other woman in the household, reads the Bible to the new prisoner, but we are never told what passages. Again, the level of research seems to be “they’re violent and crazy, and also there’s a Bible.”

Besides being a horror/thriller, Gray After Dark is also a little bit of a love story. The chapters swing back and forth between the perspective of Miley and her ordeal with the preppers, and her dear friend, Olympics training partner, and not-quite-yet boyfriend, Brent. That’s right, in the manner of a romance novel. Brent is tracking Miley through the Frank Church Wilderness, which he compares to “looking for a lost watch in New York City.” He is really devoted to her, and his sweet strength provides a refreshing counterpoint to Fred and Hamish’s harsh weakness. The proportion is about two or three chapters of Miley to one of Brent.

And, though I’ve been somewhat hard on this book for its portrayal of the “Christian” preppers, it works really well as a thriller/love story. It isn’t really about Christian-adjacent prepping cults. Fred and Hamish are there to provide the horror and the threat. I’m willing to accept that people like this exist, albeit in small numbers (at least in the West), just as I’m willing to accept that large numbers of people become very animalistic in an EMP apocalypse or a zombie apocalypse, for the sake of the story. And that’s what Gray After Dark is … more of an “imagine this situation” type of story than an “all of society is like this” story of the kind we might expect from Margaret Atwood. It’s a page turner, and despite some minor hiccups I enjoyed it.

What do you think? Do you like thrillers? Love stories? Apocalyptic? Wilderness survival? Have you ever gotten bugs in your flour?