A History Of Wild Places

Content Warning: This section of the guide refers to death by suicide.

Diegetic excerpts from book one of Maggie St. James’s Eloise and the Foxtail series are interspersed throughout the narrative. A young girl, Eloise, sees a “riddle fox.” She wonders whether it’s real or a dream but realizes that both dreams and nightmares are rare.

Travis Wren has the ability to see people’s final moments when he is around objects and places related to them. He stops at a gas and grocery store that is “paralyzed in time” and asks the woman behind the counter if she has heard of Maggie St. James (6). Maggie is the author of a popular children’s book series about a character who finds an underground museum, and a young reader notoriously died after trying to dig deep into the ground to mimic this.

The shopkeeper tells him everyone in the area has and complains about the spectacle the woman’s disappearance instigated. The narrator asks if Maggie passed through town, and she tells him that Maggie asked about a red barn nearby, so she told her about the uninhabited Kettering place. Maggie’s car was found abandoned the next morning.

Travis goes to the barn and holds an old charm—a book—that Maggie wore on a necklace.