It starts with Just Watching. But danger emerges when Just Watching Ends.
When âwild childâ Xavier first encounters Cass and her dogs in the woods of West Quebec, he is enthralled. Unknown to Cass, he Just Watches them in an ongoing surveillance, before staging a meeting. His motives are uncertain â even to him.
The intersection of the lives of Cass, her dogs, her cousin Lori, and Xavier, leads them all into a spiral of danger. It starts when Just Watching ends - when Cass and her crew encounter tragedy in the bush. Xavierâs involvement in the tragedy, unknown to Cass, triggers a chain of potentially lethal events, that begin in Lac Rouge, when wilderness recreation, hunting, trapping, marijuana grow-ops, and pedophilia, collide. It matures in the suburbs, and then culminates back in Lac Rouge, when danger arrives uninvited at Cassâ isolated cabin in the woods. The danger is observed by Xavier, whose motives are again uncertain, but whose propensity for action is not.
Join Xavier, Lori, Cass and the realistic and compelling dogs that are essential players in this dark drama, as their fates converge in a deadly loop of revenge, fear, guilt, and hope.
It starts with Just Watching. But danger emerges when Just Watching Ends.
When âwild childâ Xavier first encounters Cass and her dogs in the woods of West Quebec, he is enthralled. Unknown to Cass, he Just Watches them in an ongoing surveillance, before staging a meeting. His motives are uncertain â even to him.
The intersection of the lives of Cass, her dogs, her cousin Lori, and Xavier, leads them all into a spiral of danger. It starts when Just Watching ends - when Cass and her crew encounter tragedy in the bush. Xavierâs involvement in the tragedy, unknown to Cass, triggers a chain of potentially lethal events, that begin in Lac Rouge, when wilderness recreation, hunting, trapping, marijuana grow-ops, and pedophilia, collide. It matures in the suburbs, and then culminates back in Lac Rouge, when danger arrives uninvited at Cassâ isolated cabin in the woods. The danger is observed by Xavier, whose motives are again uncertain, but whose propensity for action is not.
Join Xavier, Lori, Cass and the realistic and compelling dogs that are essential players in this dark drama, as their fates converge in a deadly loop of revenge, fear, guilt, and hope.
Our cabin doesnât have a basement. It is raised on cinderblocks, and is only maybe a foot off the groundâŚThat has allowed me to have an excellent place to hide things I donât want Stefan to know about. There are boards underneath where the kitchen is, that Iâve had to explore when working with insulation. I now have my own special board, where Iâve hollowed out a space where I can hide stuff.  My secret stuff incudes extra notebooks with the drawings of Cassie and the dogs, that would reveal how much time I spend observing them. But it also includes special stuff Iâve liberated, that I donât want Stefan to know about.
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Liberation is a game Stefan taught me when I was littlelittle. He told me that good equipment deserves to be well cared-for. When he was teaching me how to Just Watch, heâd find hunting stands where we could watch campers, fishermen, and hunters. And he would explain when they did things right, and when they didnât. Not looking after your equipment is not right. So when people were careless, and particularly when they were careless and drunk, or even better - careless, drunk and asleep ( which happens pretty often!) he taught me how to do a super-quiet  âleopard crawlâ, which means crawling really low to the ground on your belly. And I would have to leopard crawl to liberate the good equipment. It was scary and very fun! I got us lots of good stuff.  As far as Stefan knew, it all went into a big wooden chest in the book room.
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But I have liberated some stuff on my own â things I never told Stefan about. And that stuff goes into my hiding space under the house. Most of it is small stuff. My favorite little liberation was a system for carrying water in a pack with a hose you can sip it through. But the main thing, the big thing in my hiding space, is the rifle I liberated a year ago, when Stefan was away.
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I was Just Watching a little clearing off the main road where hunters often met up with each other.  It was early in the season, and I was there before any one arrived. But as the sun rose, four SUVs showed up. They were all big, expensive looking vehicles. Six men got out, all dressed in in the kind of clothes that hunters from the city wear and that Stefan makes fun of. One of the men, who I think maybe was younger than the others, acted really excited. He reminded me of how bullshit dogs like Zeke try to act tough but end up wagging their tails really fast and low and licking the mouths of the no-bullshit dogs. He was the guy with the biggest SUV. While they were getting ready to go, he took two rifles out of the car and showed them to the other men. There was a lot of discussion. Iâm pretty sure they were deciding which one he should use that day. They decided on the fancier, newer-looking one, with a powerful-looking scope. The guy put the other one back in the SUVâŚÂ Â
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It never occurred to me to liberate it. Breaking into a car was not something Stefan had taught me to do. But the guy never locked his vehicle! I couldnât believe it!
"Emergence" was an easy read but also easy to set aside. When reading, I was engaged with the text; but, I also grew bored of it too. Honestly, there was nothing wrong with the writing itself. The writing was exceptional in many ways in regard to detail and descriptions used; but, the storyline itself was predictable. I dislike predictability: The ability to see where a story is heading before it reaches its various climatic points of interest.
Despite this book not being for me personally, I chose to give it a three-star rating because visceral reactions count too! (See my five-star rating of "Gone Girl" on Goodreads to fully understand my why behind this.)
Never before have I read a book where dogs were so well included, celebrated, and true to character and the very nature of their being. For dog lovers, this book is highly recommended. For you, this book should prove to give you all the feels to include pride, companionship, love, and tears. Due to your love of these four-legged creatures, this book may very well be unputdownable!
This book ends with a bit of an open ending where I'm not certain all is well and safe. Room for a sequel perhaps? You see, the one "just watching", Xavier, may one day take his obsessions too far in which case isn't he a danger to us all?
This book will bring up questions for you about morality. Is it okay when a "monster" is killed out in the woods, with no one bearing witness but the murderer himself? Is there ever room for murder to be thought of other than wrong, where it's no longer one of the ten commandments set in stone but goes from granite to limestone where from a black and white issue there ensues a bit of gray? How does that sit with you?
This book will make you sit and be a bit uncomfortable while doing so. For some, it may make you question and stretch and wonder aloud. Perhaps nothing is as it appears to be or maybe it's all exactly as it seems. It's this last part that snared me and dragged me down. Too few surprises make a psychological thriller a letdown.
For those just entering the woods of where a psychological thriller may lead, this book is a decent introduction. It will make your wheels spin and cause you to think; but, for better or worse, you won't be so engrossed as to where your heart races or skips a beat.