Looking for a SF/alternate history book about a 19th century style explorer who navigates lands with corrupted fauna and flora

Question

Apologies in advance for the vagueness, as I have not read it but only remember fragments of the summary blurb on the back from glancing at it in a bookstore.

What I do remember:

• It imitated the atmosphere of those 19th century (or early 20th) travel memoirs/notes, but was written either this century or in the late 90's onwards based on the vibe/cover design etc.
• Was in English
• The premise is that of an explorer who encounters gradually more corrupted wildlife as he explores the lands
• I think it took place in an alternate America or at least in an Anglo setting.
• The cover included painted depictions of a wild scene (i.e. one an explorer would venture into) with a slightly eerie quality

From googling various combinations of keywords, I either get actual 19th century travel memoirs or works like those of Jeff VanderMeer that have to do with the same idea of corruption but aren't the target book. ChatGPT was unable to find it either with the description above.

Answer 1

Possibly Darwinia by Robert Charles Wilson?

• Set in 1912.
• Published 1998.
• Starting in America, traveling to an altered Europe.
• The TOR paperback has a wild coast with steamships.

Answer 2

This sounds vaguely like Patricia Wrede's Frontier Magic trilogy, in particular one of the last two books, Across the Great Barrier and The Far West. These books were published in 2011 and 2012, so they are consistent with your time frame for seeing it.

Some differences from your description:

• the narrator is a woman and not a man,
• the covers aren't exactly a wild scene, but they are a portrait of the heroine with a wild forest in the background.

It did take place in an alternate America, and it is true in these books that the farther West you go, the more magical and dangerous the wildlife is (although "corrupted" isn't really the correct word).

Answer 3

Your description made me think of The Chrysalids by John Wyndham - it's set in the future rather than the past, but it does have a 19th-ish century America vibe to it as it's set long enough after an apocalypse that the inhabitants don't know what's happened.

The premise doesn't involve an explorer, but the town the protagonist lives in is close to the Fringes, a place where mutations are common. Animals and people in the town with any kind of mutation are killed or sterilised and banished to the Fringes. The kids in the story have also heard tales of sailors seeing much worse the further away they travel.