Evergreen is a 95 page psychological thriller published to Amazon Kindle by Canadian speculative fiction author Jackson Haime. It was originally written as a serialised narrative in response to a 2015 prompt on the r/WritingPrompts subreddit:
Instead of Oceans, they are all big forests, that gets taller and darker instead of deeper, with more dangerous animals living further out in the forest. A person decides to cross the Mariana Trench.
This writing prompt ultimately inspired numerous high-quality serial responses, some of which made it to Kindle, like The Forest Trilogy by Justin Groot. Evergreen, however, is the trailblazer response to this prompt, and it kickstarted Haime's writing fame, in tandem with another r/WritingPrompts work of his, Splitting Seconds.
In Evergreen, a documentary film crew attempts to make the first-ever successful navigation of the Great Pacific Forest, which in Haime's narrative is in the same part of the planet where the Pacific Ocean is found in our world. Over the course of the narrative, the protagonist Everett West faces otherworldly entities, predatory trees, and crew members who disappear and return changed or even replaced by people he has never met before. Everett doesn't understand the cause of these happenings, and while the author asserts that there is a correct answer to the mystery, he leaves it as an exercise for the reader to puzzle out. In the past, on his own writing subreddit r/JacksonWrites, Haime would privately message to confirm the answer to any reader whose theories and musings in the series discussion threads were correct or very close to the mark.
Evergreen is splendidly unnerving, and the unreliable narrator exacerbates this effect, simply by being - as the author himself states - "a bit of a blockhead," criminally unaware of his surroundings and inconsiderate to his crew, regarding himself as the only truly necessary member for the show to proceed. It becomes more and more difficult over the course of the story to differentiate Everett's own self-interested obliviousness from the dangerous influence of carnivorous trees with miles-high canopies and the survival tactics of anglerfish.
I recommend Evergreen to anyone who enjoyed Jeff VanderMeer's Annihilation, House of Leaves, any part of The Magnus Archives podcast, Old Gods of Appalachia, or the 1979 Russian film Stalker.
Iron Noder 2024, 15/30