'Wicker King' by K. Ancrum

Wicker King

Author: K. Ancrum

Rating: B

Vibe: A raw, atmospheric look at queer teenage codependency that nails the descent but loses some of its nerve at the landing.

August is a poor mixed-race misfit with a pyro streak who runs drugs in his high school for cash. Jack is a wealthy golden boy on the varsity rugby team. The world thinks they shouldn't be friends. They've been each other's whole emotional ecosystem for years. When Jack starts having vivid hallucinations—an elaborate fantasy kingdom layered over reality, with quests and a prophecy and a king who needs them—August doesn't tell anyone. He just believes him. He follows him in. Set in 2003, K. Ancrum's The Wicker King is a debut about two boys who have nobody but each other, told as their grip on the world (and on themselves) starts to slip.

A practical note before getting into it: skip the audiobook on this one. Ancrum writes in micro-chapters, sometimes a page or less, and the book also leans heavily on its physical design. The pages literally darken from cream to black as Jack's hallucinations worsen, with photos, police reports, and torn notebook pages dropped in along the way. All of that is meaningful in print and lost on audio. Read this one with your eyes.

What the book does better than almost anything I've seen in YA: codependency. Not metaphorically, not as a tagline—rendered. August and Jack aren't in a "toxic friendship" the way YA usually means it, where one of them is the obvious villain. They're in something more recognizable and more dangerous: two people whose self-knowledge is so entangled with each other's that there's no longer a meaningful separation. August can't tell whether he's helping Jack or destroying himself. Jack can't tell whether his visions are illness or destiny. Neither has the language to name what's happening, and even if they did, there's no adult in their lives to hand it to them. Ancrum gets the specific texture of being a teenager whose entire interior life lives inside another person.

For queer readers, especially gay men who came up before being out was easy, this is going to land. There's a particular kind of friendship that happens in adolescence—two boys who have no language for what they actually feel about each other, who become each other's everything because there's nowhere else to put it, who exist in a heightened private reality nobody else is invited into. Whether or not it's labeled romance (and the book is openly enough queer that I don't think the queerbaiting accusations hold up), it's the shape of so many formative gay teenage relationships. Ancrum captures that without flinching.

The format choices mostly work. The very short chapters create a fragmented, hallucinatory rhythm that mirrors August's deteriorating sense of what's real. The darkening pages are a gimmick, but a good one—it pulls you into the descent in a way prose alone couldn't. The multimedia inserts feel a little superfluous in places, more atmospheric than load-bearing, but they don't hurt the book.

Where it loses me is the ending. I'll keep this strictly spoiler-free, but after the slow, suffocating, beautifully claustrophobic build, the resolution lands a little too tidy for what the book has been doing. Ancrum spends most of the novel insisting that codependency this deep doesn't have clean exits—and then the exit she gives feels slightly cleaner than the story earned. I wanted the ending to sit in the discomfort longer. It almost does. It doesn't quite.

A solid B. The Wicker King is an unusually serious YA novel about a relationship dynamic most YA romanticizes—two queer kids drowning together while nobody notices—and it's worth reading for the descent alone. Just don't expect the landing to feel as honest as the fall.