Growing up with the woods at my back in Central Oregon, forests have always been closest to the sublime for me. Forests hold beauty, magic, mystery, and little bit of terror – there is nothing quite so eerie as the silence of the woods on a snowy winter’s day. Since moving to Seattle, with its incredible forested areas that run right to the water’s edge, my awe has only increased. Let these tales of the deep dark woods fill you with delight, awe, and maybe some terror this spooky season.
Sometimes, the scariest thing in the woods is your past. The Children of Red Peak by Craig Dilouie and A History of Wild Places by Shea Ernshaw both explore memory and trauma of adult characters who grew up in cults and must now reckon with both their memory of the past as well as the monsters hidden in plain view. In Bad Cree, Jessica Johns’ deeply moving meditation on the horror of grief, a young Cree woman must return home to Alberta to ask for her estranged family’s help when her dreams start mixing with reality in terrifying ways.
Sometimes, however, the scariest thing in the woods is you. Not for the faint of heart, The Laws of the Skies by Gregoire Courtois reads in part like an update to the Lord of the Flies, but with much more murderous intent. Set in Colonial New England, Laird Hunt’s In The House In the Dark of the Woods explores a woman stuck between the rock of domineering Puritanism and a hard place of being taken in by terrifying witches after getting lost in the woods.
But what if the monsters in the woods are real? In A.M. Shine’s atmospheric The Watchers, a woman’s car breaks down at the edge of a forest that isn’t on any map. Herded into the woods by a woman screaming to get to a concrete bunker before nightfall, she finds that the bunker is no escape from the creatures in the woods. Set in the back woods of Tennessee during the Prohibition era, Daryl Gregory’s Revelator explores the tangled history of a bootlegging family and their personal god known as Ghostdaddy. Long-forgotten horned kings haunt the dark woods of Caedmon Hollow in Dale Bailey’s In the Night Wood, where a man mourning the loss of his daughter seeks to heal his life and marriage by moving into the ancestral home of a legendary Victorian children’s author to write the author’s biography. As his scholarly pursuit turns into obsession, a shadowy presence beckons him ever deeper into the woods.
But there’s no escape when the forest itself gets under your skin and haunts you. A classic of elemental horror, The Willows by Algernon Blackwood will do just that. In The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon by Stephen King, a teen girl must rely on nothing but her abiding love of the Boston Red Sox’s Tom Gordon and her own courage after she accidentally goes off trail in the New England Appalachian woods. In Catriona Ward’s The Last House on Needless Street, everyone can feel that there’s something off about the house at the edge of the woods, but just what it is…well, it’s not what anyone thinks. The less said about this one, the better reading experience you’ll have.
If you prefer visuals to phantasmal terrors conjured solely through an author’s narrative talents, try these terrifying graphic novels. Through The Woods By Emily Carroll is a collection of six beautiful and disturbing illustrated tales sure to send shivers down your spine. Scott Snyder’s Wytches will simultaneously leave you relieved the horror is over and longing for another volume. The latter won’t be the case with James Tynion IV’s ongoing series Something is Killing the Children, but you may still find yourself looking for relief from the delicious horror.
~posted by V.
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