The Crawl

The Crawl
By Natalie Dee Cleyre

A searing literary survival novel about queer longing, wilderness, and the bodies we carry through both.

Hayley Meeks just wanted to feel close to her chosen family. A quiet retail worker with old scars and tender hope, she agrees to a backcountry hiking trip in Montana with her fierce, enigmatic friend Alexa and the free-spirited Ashley. But the wilderness has teeth-and after a brutal grizzly attack leaves Hayley mutilated and stranded, survival becomes more than a matter of will. It becomes a reckoning.

As her body deteriorates, Hayley must claw her way through an unforgiving landscape, confronting trauma past and present, hallucinations of abandonment, and the shattering truth about those she trusted most. Each mile becomes a dirge of memory, violence, and raw determination. Somewhere beyond the forest lies rescue-or death-but the path there is no straight line. It's a crawl.

The Crawl is not a wilderness adventure. It is a brutal, visceral descent into the realities of trauma-bonded love, dissociation, and queer survival. Told in stunning, lyrical prose and grounded in survivor psychology, the novel explores how devotion and dependency can blur-how love, when warped by trauma, can become both a sanctuary and a sentence.

Through Hayley's shattered body and haunted mind, The Crawl maps the psychic landscape of queer longing: the aching need to be kept, to be chosen, to be touched without being erased. It renders the wilderness not just as backdrop, but as metaphor-teeming, merciless, and holy. The line between flesh and forest, between caretaking and control, becomes dangerously thin.

Themes of body horror, medical trauma, and survival realism intertwine with reflections on religious abuse, codependency, and the human hunger to be seen whole. Hayley's journey is one of impossible endurance-not toward healing as triumph, but toward reclamation as act of defiance.

This is not a story about being rescued. It is a story about choosing to live, even after those who promised to stay have walked away.

Content Warning:
This novel contains graphic depictions of medical trauma, emotional and physical abuse, religious trauma, and scenes of sexual violence. It also explores themes of abandonment, dissociation, and coercive caregiving within trauma-bonded relationships. Reader discretion is strongly advised.