Reading order
| # | Title | Published | Author | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Pines | 2012 | Blake Crouch | Buy |
| 2 | Wayward | 2013 | Blake Crouch | Buy |
| 3 | The Last Town | 2014 | Blake Crouch | Buy |
Ethan Burke is a Secret Service agent who wakes up in Wayward Pines, Idaho, after a car accident. The town looks normal. People are friendly. But he can’t reach the outside world. There are no phones that connect to anywhere beyond the town limits. The roads loop back on themselves. An electrified fence surrounds the perimeter. And residents who break the rules get executed in front of the whole community.
Blake Crouch wrote Pines as a self-published novel in 2012. He’d been writing thrillers for years without a major breakout. The book found an audience quickly. Crouch designed the first novel as a mystery box: what is Wayward Pines, and why can’t anyone leave? The answer, revealed at the end of the first book, reframes everything. The two sequels deal with the consequences.
Crouch paces the trilogy like a television season. Short chapters, constant movement, revelations spaced at regular intervals. The influence of his screenwriting work shows. Fox adapted the books into a television series in 2015, with M. Night Shyamalan directing the pilot. The show ran for two seasons.
After Wayward Pines, Crouch wrote Dark Matter and Recursion, both science fiction thrillers that became bestsellers. He has described his approach as starting with a high-concept idea and working backward to find the human story inside it. Wayward Pines was where that method first clicked with a wide audience.