In The House In The Dark Woods

In this ingenious horror story set in colonial New England, a woman goes missing. Or not missing – perhaps she has fled, abandoned her family. Or perhaps she’s been kidnapped and set loose to wander in the dense woods of the north. Alone and possibly lost, she meets another woman in the forest. Then everything changes.
On a journey that will take her through a wolf-haunted wood, down a deep well, and onto a living ship made of human bones, our heroine is forced to confront her past and may find that the evil she flees has been inside her all along.
Eerie and disturbing, In The House In The Dark Woods is a novel of psychological horror and suspense told in Laird Hunt’s acclaimed lyrical prose. It is the story of a bewitching, a betrayal, a master huntress and her quarry. It is a story of anger, of oppression, of revenge and redemption.
It is a story of a haunting, one that forms the bedrock of American mythology, told in a vivid voice you will never forget.

I love following the Belletrist book club – even if I am several months behind at any given time – because almost always it introduces me to a title that never would have been on my radar otherwise. In The House In The Dark Woods, their pick from back in October, is a dark horror-fairy tale, a sinister and magical story about patriarchy, violence and coercion.

“For my own part I kept very quiet, as quiet as I have ever been, for there are things in this world that you think will never come to pass that will rob you of your voice for nothing but the joy of them when suddenly they do.”

Laird Hunt has a lyrical and strange writing style that is beautiful, but, for me anyway, took a little time to get used to. He is prone to very long sentences that follow the narrator’s rambling thoughts. They’re often lovely, but easy to get lost in. Kind of like the woods Goody, the narrator – not her real name, which we never learn – wanders, I guess.

The dark woods are filled with supernatural and formidable women. Captain Jane, self-styled queen of the woods, second only to Granny Someone, an evil force who only consumes; Eliza, a fairy-like presence with a welcoming cottage for weary wood-wanderers – well, friendly at first; and Hope, the mysterious child who always seems to show up at the exact moment you need her the most.

Everything about the narrative is unreliable – from Goody’s Man, who she initially represents as a caring presence she is desperate to find her way home to before soon revealing him as violent and abusive, to the very fabric of the woods, which seen through a magical stone turn horrifying, with even the animals transformed to monsters through its lens.

Most of all In The House In The Dark Woods is a deeply unsettling horror story. It’s hard to go into any analytical detail without spoilers – the curse of reviewing a story with an unreliable narrator – but with carefully constructed half-truths, corner-of-the-eye jumps and the sudden and jarring injection of the grotesque, Hunt winds a tight knot of anxiety in your stomach, even as you wonder what on earth is going on.

If you enjoyed the tragic twist at the end of We Were Liars or the underlying act of horror at the centre of The Walls Around Us then the complex and misleading women that populate In The House In The Dark Woods will likely catch your imagination too.