In The Night Wood

By Dale Bailey

In this contemporary fantasy, the grieving biographer of a Victorian fantasist finds himself slipping inexorably into the supernatural world that consumed his subject

Failed father, failed husband, and failed scholar, Charles Hayden hopes to put his life back together with a new project: a biography of Caedmon Hollow, the long-dead author of a legendary Victorian children’s book, In the Night Wood, and forebear of his wife, Erin. Deep in mourning from the loss of their young daughter, they pack up their American lives, Erin gives up her legal practice, and the couple settles in Hollow’s remote Yorkshire mansion.

In the neighboring village, Charles meets a woman he might have loved, a child who could have been his own daughter, and the ghost of a self he hoped to bury. Erin, paralyzed by her grief, immerses herself in pills and painting images of a horned terror in the woods.

In the primeval forest surrounding Caedmon Hollow’s ancestral home, an ancient power is stirring, a long-forgotten king who haunts the Haydens’ dreams. And every morning the fringe of darkling trees presses closer.

Soon enough, Charles and Erin will venture into the night wood.

Soon enough, they’ll learn that the darkness under the trees is but a shadow of the darkness that waits inside us all.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Oct 9, 2018
• ISBN: 9781328490810

Dale Bailey

DALE BAILEY is the critically acclaimed author of seven books, including The End of the End of Everything and The Subterranean Season. His story “Death and Suffrage” was adapted for Showtime’s Masters of Horror television series. His short fiction has won the Shirley Jackson Award and the International Horror Guild Award, has been nominated for the Nebula and Bram Stoker awards, and has been reprinted frequently in best-of-the-year anthologies, including The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy. He lives in North Carolina with his family.

Book preview

title page

Contents

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Title Page

Contents

Copyright

Frontispiece

Dedication

Epigraphs

Prelude

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Hollow House

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Yarrow

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In the Night Wood

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Author’s Note

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Connect with HMH

Copyright © 2018 by Dale Bailey

All rights reserved

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [e-mail] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

hmhco.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Bailey, Dale, author.

Title: In the night wood / Dale Bailey.

Description: Boston ; New York : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018. | A John Joseph Adams Book.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017058529 (print) | LCCN 2018001185 (ebook) | ISBN 9781328490810 (ebook) | ISBN 9781328494436 (hardback)

Subjects: | BISAC: FICTION / Fantasy / Contemporary. | FICTION / Fairy Tales, Folk Tales, Legends & Mythology. | GSAFD: Fantasy Fiction.

Classification: LCC PS3602.A54 (ebook) | LCC PS3602.A54 15 2018 (print) | DDC 813/.6—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017058529

Cover illustrations © Andrew Davidson

Cover design by Martha Kennedy

Frontispiece illustration © Andrew Davidson

Author photograph © Shane Greene

v3.1019

For Pam and Sally

The specific mode of existence of man implies the need of his learning what happens, and above all what can happen, in the world around him and in his own interior world. That it is a matter of the structure of the human condition is shown, inter alia, by the existential necessity of listening to stories and fairy tales, even in the most tragic of circumstances.

—MIRCEA ELIADE, The Forbidden Forest

Gretel began to cry and said, How are we to get out of the forest now?

—THE BROTHERS GRIMM, HANSEL AND GRETEL

Once upon a time . . .

Prelude

By the time the moon arose and let down her golden skirts, Laura was sore afraid. In the pale light she stumbled through a ring of sinister yews into a glade where stood a single bearded oak, hoary and not unkind.

I met you once in a dream, she said.

And I you in my long, arboreal sleep, replied Grandfather Oak (for that was his name).

Isn’t that odd? Laura said to the tree.

Not at all, said Grandfather Oak, nodding sagely. The Story is rich in coincidence.

What kind of Story is it? asked Laura.

And just then the North Wind swept through the trees, and Grandfather Oak shivered all his branches and dropped down a curtain of golden leaves. It is not a happy Story, he said. But so few Stories are.

—CAEDMON HOLLOW, In the Night Wood

1

Hollow House came to them as such events befall orphans in tales, unexpectedly, and in the hour of their greatest need: salvation in the form of a long blue envelope shoved in among the day’s haul of pizza-delivery flyers, catalogs, and credit card solicitations. That’s how Charles would pitch it to Erin, anyway, sitting across from her in the night kitchen, with the envelope and its faintly exotic Royal Mail stamp lying on the table between them. Yet it felt to Charles Hayden like the culminating moment in some obscure chain of events that had been building, link by link, through all the thirty-six years of his life—through centuries even, though he could not have imagined that at the time.

Where do tales begin, after all?

Once upon a time.

In the months that followed, those words—and the stories they conjured up for him—would echo in Charles’s mind. Little Red Cap and Briar Rose and Hansel and Gretel, abandoned among the dark trees by their henpecked father and his wicked second wife. Charles would think of them most of all, footsore and afraid when at last they chanced upon a cottage made of gingerbread and spun sugar and stopped to feast upon it, little suspecting the witch who lurked within, ravenous with hungers of her own.

Once upon a time.

So tales begin, each alike in some desperate season. Yet how many other crises—starting points for altogether different tales—wait to unfold themselves in the rich loam of every story, like seeds germinating among the roots of a full-grown tree? How came that father to be so faithless? What made his wife so cruel? What brought that witch to those woods and imparted to her appetites so unsavory?

So many links in the chain of circumstance. So many stories inside stories, waiting to be told.

Once upon a time.

Once upon a time, at the wake for a grandfather he had never known in life, a boy named Charles Hayden, his mother’s only child, scrawny and bespectacled and always a little bit afraid, sought refuge in the library of the sprawling house his mother had grown up in. The ancestral manse, Kit (she was that kind of mother) had called it when she told him they’d be going there, and even at age eight he could detect the bitter edge in her voice. Charles had never seen anything like it—not just the house, but the library itself, a single room two or three times the size of the whole apartment he shared with Kit, furnished in dark, glossy wood and soft leather, and lined with books on every wall. His sneakers were silent on the plush rugs, and as he looked around, slack-jawed in wonder, the boisterous cries of his cousins on the lawn wafted dimly through the sun-shot Palladian windows.

Charles had never met the cousins before. He’d never met any of these people; he hadn’t even known they existed. Puttering up the winding driveway this morning in their wheezing old Honda, he’d felt like a child in a story, waking one morning to discover that he’s a prince in hiding, that his parents (his parent) were not his parents after all, but faithful retainers to an exiled king. Prince or no, the cousins—a thuggish trio of older boys clad in stylish dress clothes that put to shame his ill-fitting cords and secondhand oxford (the frayed tail already hanging out)—had taken an instant dislike to this impostor in their midst. Nor had anyone else seemed particularly enamored of Charles’s presence. Even now he could hear adult voices contending in the elegant chambers beyond the open door, Kit’s querulous and pleading, and those of his two aunts (Regan and Goneril, Kit called them) firm and unyielding.

Adult matters. Charles turned his attention to the books. Sauntering the length of a shelf, he trailed one finger idly along beside him, bump bump bump across the spines of the books, like a kid dragging a stick down a picket fence. At last, he turned and plucked down by chance from the rows of books a single volume, bound in glistening brown leather, with red bands on the spine.

Outside the door, his mother’s voice rose sharply.

One of the aunts snapped something in response.

In the stillness that followed—even the cousins had fallen silent—Charles examined the book. The supple leather boards were embossed with some kind of complex design. He studied it, mapping the pattern—a labyrinth of ridges and whorls—with the ball of his thumb. Then he opened the book. The frontispiece echoed the motif inscribed on the cover; here, he could see it clearly, a stylized forest scene: gnarled trees with serpentine roots and branches twining about one another in sinuous profusion. Twisted, and bearded with lichen, the trees projected an oddly menacing aura of sentience—branches like clutching fingers, a hollow like a screaming mouth. Strange faces, seemingly chance intersections of leaf and bough, peered out at him from the foliage: a grinning serpent, a malevolent cat, an owl with the face of a frightened child.

And on the facing page:

In the Night Wood

by

Caedmon Hollow

Looking down at the words—like the frontispiece, garlanded with foliage—Charles felt his heart quicken. The age-darkened pages smelled like a cellar of exotic spices thrown open in an airless room, and their texture, faintly ridged underneath his fingers and laid through with pale equidistant lines, felt like the latitudes of a world yet unmapped. Those sly foxlike faces, peering everywhere out at him from tangles of leaf and briar, seemed to consult among themselves, a confabulation of whispers too faint to quite discern, there and gone again in the same breath. His finger crept out to turn the page.

Charles.

He looked up, startled.

Kit stood in the doorway, her thin mouth compressed into a bloodless line. Staring at her, Charles saw for the first time—as with an adult’s eyes—how old she looked, how tired, how different from her immaculate sisters, lacquered to within an inch of their lives. He thought of his grandfather, that stranger in the casket who shared Kit’s jutting cheekbones and deep blue eyes. It fell upon him like a blow, that image. It nearly staggered him.

We’re leaving, Charles. Get your things.

He swallowed. Okay.

She held his gaze a moment longer. Then she was gone.

Charles started to slide the book back into its slot on the shelf—but hesitated. He felt once again that sense of tremulous significance, as if the flow of events had been shunted into a new and unsuspected channel. As if thrones and dominions more powerful than he could imagine had stepped briefly from behind some hidden curtain in the air. The room almost hummed with their presence.

He could not surrender the book, this artifact of a life that, but for Kit, could have been his own: the manicured lawns and the vast rooms and the great library most of all. (Libraries would be the lodestone of his life.) He would have to tuck it into his knapsack and spirit it out of the house.

He would have to steal it.

As this conviction took root inside him, Charles felt a surge of panic. Terror and exhilaration vibrated through him like a plucked chord.

He wanted to flee, to cast aside the book and, for the first time all day, seek human companionship. Even the unbearable cousins would do. But he could not seem to pry loose his frozen fingers. As of its own accord, the book fell open in his hands, and he found himself flipping past the frontispiece and the title page to the text itself: Chapter One.

The initial letter of the opening sentence was inset and oversized and bound in ornate runners of leaf and vine. For a moment, his inexperienced eye could not decode it. And then abruptly, the entire phrase snapped into focus.

Once upon a time, it said.

2

But for the book, Charles might have forgotten the entire episode. For all Kit ever spoke of it, the whole day might have been an elaborate fantasy inspired by their itinerant existence in a succession of cheap walk-up apartments, sustained by a series of minimum-wage jobs (Fired again, she always told him ruefully when one of them headed south) and well-meaning but feckless boyfriends, most of whom exuded a sweet-smelling haze that Charles would many years later come to recognize as the scent of pot.

But the stolen leather volume had a way of turning up anew with each fresh move—in a box of mateless socks or shoved in among the well-thumbed paperbacks on Kit’s bedroom shelf. Finally, home sick one afternoon in Baltimore—they’d only just moved; he must have been nine or ten at the time—Charles actually read it.

The story showed up in his dreams for days thereafter, a hallucinatory montage of great trees pressing close upon a woodland path, a terrified child, a horned king, his pale horse steaming at the nostrils in the midnight air. Afterward, Charles could never be quite certain whether to attribute the eidetic quality of these images to the book itself or to the feverish condition he’d been in when he read it. He meant to go back and have another look, but the pressures attendant upon being the new kid at school (he was always the new kid at school, and a bookish, nerdy kid at that) intervened.

By the time he did try to go back, two or three moves later, the book had evaporated, vanished in one of the more recent relocations. And this time it really was forgotten.

It might have stayed that way had Charles not enrolled in a seminar in Victorian nonsense literature fifteen years later. He’d been on his own for years by then (sometimes it felt like he’d always been on his own, like he’d spent more time parenting Kit than vice versa), a scholarship kid who did well enough as an undergraduate English major to snag a teaching assistantship at one of the big state Ph.D. mills. There, he divided his time between a derelict apartment in the student ghetto, cramped classrooms, where he held forth on the merits of the thesis statement to bored freshmen only four or five years his junior, and the classes he was taking, where the air was thick with intellectual posturing and professional anxiety. He’d enrolled in the nonsense seminar out of necessity, when the class he’d really wanted—a course in literary theory taught by a fading Ivy League enfant terrible who planed in once a week to teach his classes and then promptly vanished—filled up before he could get in.

So it happened that Charles—at twenty-five, still scrawny and bespectacled, still a little bit afraid—found himself in the university library one cold February evening, reading up on Edward Lear. He’d just started nodding when his eye chanced upon a footnote referencing an obscure Victorian fantasist by the name of Caedmon Hollow. Now almost entirely forgotten (Charles read), Hollow had written only a single book: In the Night Wood.

The title jerked Charles fully awake. The library was silent, cool, and all but abandoned at this late hour. A hard snow ticked against the windows, but despite the chill, a thick column of heat climbed through him. Rereading the footnote, he felt time slip. He was a child again, alone in his grandfather’s enormous library with the cries of the dreadful triumvirate of cousins sounding far away beyond the great arched windows. Long-forgotten details from that single feverish reading flooded through him: a full moon looking down through the mists of the Night Wood; the Mere of Souls, black in its midnight glade; a child flying through the whispering trees; the Horned King upon his pale horse.

Shit, he whispered, setting aside the book. He stood and made his way across the reading room to a bank of terminals and tapped the title into the catalog. A few minutes later, clutching a call slip in one hand, Charles caught an elevator to an upper floor. Walking the labyrinth of stacks and dragging a single finger in his wake, bump bump bump across the spines of the books, Charles nearly missed it.

He supposed he’d been expecting the same beautiful, leather-bound volume he’d plucked from his grandfather’s shelf. The library’s copy was infinitely more practical, a thin, sturdy book bound in blue boards—or rebound, he surmised when he flipped it open to find the same baroque frontispiece. It was a woodcut, he saw, the lines strong and sure.

Wily faces peered out at him from behind the boles of the ancient, lichen-shrouded trees, their great splayed roots knuckling down into beds of rich, damp soil. As he gazed at them, the faces seemed to shift and draw back into the foliage, only to appear again, peeping out at him from some neighboring bower of wood and leaf. He imagined that he overheard their whispered conversations in the air around him.

He started back toward the elevator, flipping to the first chapter, that opening invocation—

Once upon a time

—ringing in his head. When he turned the corner and collided with someone strolling the other way, Charles had a brief and not unpleasant impression that he’d been enveloped in a feminine cloud, faintly redolent of lavender. Caught off balance, he threw out his arms to catch himself—

Watch where you’re going! the girl cried.

—and went over backward. He thumped to the floor, his glasses flying one way, his book the other. He was still scrambling for the former when the cloud of perfume enveloped him once again.

Steady there, the girl said. You okay?

He blinked at her owlishly. Yeah, I— His fingers closed over his glasses. He fumbled with them, and she swam briefly into focus, a small, lean brunette in her mid-twenties, with a prominently boned face and wide-set hazel eyes, bright with amusement—not beautiful, exactly, but . . . striking, Kit would have called her. Out of his league, anyway, that much was sure. I guess I wasn’t looking where I was going.

I guess not.

She took his hand and heaved him to his feet, startling him all over again. Steady, she said as he snatched at the nearest shelf. He was still trying to get his glasses adjusted—he thought he might have bent the frames—when she reappeared with his book.

What was it you were so intent on, anyway?

Nothing, he sputtered. It was—I—

Waving him into silence, she flipped the book over to see for herself. She laughed out loud. Small world.

What, Charles said, still fussing with his glasses. You’ve read it?

Once upon a time, long ago.

Not many people have read it.

Not like I have, she said.

What do you mean?

You wouldn’t believe me if I told you, she said, shoving the book at him. Here. Hold still. Shaking her head, she reached out and straightened his glasses. Maybe they weren’t bent after all. Better?

Yeah, I guess so. Thanks.

You bet. Reaching out once again—Charles forced himself not to step back—the girl brushed a speck of imaginary dust from his shoulder. All set?

Yeah, I mean—Yeah.

Good.

Smiling, the girl slipped past him into the stacks.

Wait, Charles said. I wanted—

But she was already gone, leaving a perfect girl-shaped vacuum in the air before him. Shit, Charles said, turning to look after her, but the library was cold and empty, a forest of nine-foot shelves branching off as far as the eye could see.

Then, in one of the few courageous acts in his life up to then, he gave chase. He turned the corner of one row of stacks and accelerated. Hey, he called. Wait up. And when he reached the next intersection—almost at a run—he nearly collided with her again. She was waiting there, leaning against a shelf, arms crossed, a sly smile upon her face.

You’re aching for a concussion today, aren’t you? she said. You sounded like a herd of wildebeests. I thought you were going to brain yourself.

I wanted to ask you something, he said. I wanted to know what you meant by ‘small world.’

That’s a complicated answer.

Let me buy you a cup of coffee. Once the phrase passed his lips, the room seemed suddenly airless. He was not the kind of man to ask strange women out for coffee. He was, in fact, not the kind of man to ask out women at all—not for lack of interest, but for lack of confidence. Assuming rejection, he found it easier to save everyone the trouble. So when she said—

Sure. Coffee sounds good.

—he exhaled an audible sigh of relief.

3

Her name was Erin, her secret unexpected (to say the least).

Coincidence, Charles called it. Coincidence that he had plucked down that book in his grandfather’s library (she dismissed it all as chance). Coincidence that he had gone on to seek a Ph.D. in English. Coincidence that on a late night in the library with snow slanting out of the black February sky, he should run (literally) into the great-great-exponentially-great-something-or-other of Caedmon Hollow himself, who might have influenced, in subtle ways, Charles’s pathway to this place.

Fate, he thought. The Worm Ouroboros. The snake biting its own tail. He had come full circle. And for a moment Charles glimpsed a vast, secret world, intersecting lines of power running just beyond the limits of human perception—a great story in which they were all of them embedded, moving toward some unimaginable conclusion.

As secrets go, it wasn’t much of one, Erin confided. The branch of the family that had immigrated to America had generations ago fallen out of touch

Reviews for In The Night Wood

[jannes_16 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A kind of meditation on guilt and loss wrapped in a supernatural covering. Reads almost as some sort of minimalist chamber play.

[veronica.sparrow · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I have always dreamed of living in an atmospheric cottage/manor in England, preferably the countryside with an ancient wood/forest around or beside it where I can imagine old mythological creatures abound like elves, satyrs, Gods, pixies, and who knows what else from the Celtic past.The book starts off easily enough with an American and his wife moving to the Yorkshire home she has inherited hoping to rekindle all they have lost of the future they expected to have together.They both see things that are impossible and are drawn to the primeval wood called The NIght Wood.I loved the writing. It is so lyrical, poetic and descriptive that I could imagine myself wandering the rooms of the house or the paths of the Night Wood itself. It really set the tone and atmosphere for me. I didn't find it spooky in the sense of a haunting or typical "scary" story but more a slow sense of dread of the unknown especially an ancient unknown. I really like novels where the horror isn't obvious and it is more the style of writing and the words chosen that develop the ambience of the story.

[sturlington_1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I had mixed feelings about In the Night Wood. For one thing, it's a gorgeous cover. I also really dug the setting: the crumbling house surrounded by a wall barely holding back a primeval wood. I liked the connection to fairy tales and the fey, the sense of something incredibly ancient barely glimpsed. However... the main characters are an estranged married couple, Erin and Charles, whose young daughter died a year before on her birthday. They have moved into Erin's ancestor's house in England to get away from the tragedy and for Charles to conduct research on the ancestor, since he lost his job by having an affair with his fellow professor. It's a lot for them, and it's a lot for us readers. Added on to that is that the primary POV character, Charles, is pretty much a shitheel. He's already had one adulterous affair, but his goofy grade-school-crush on the woman he's collaborating on the research with actually made me hate him. As the story goes along, Charles discovers an ancient curse/pact involving child sacrifice with the Horned King who inhabits the wood inside the wood. The plot is slow, consisting as it mostly does of research and Erin's slow disintegration because her husband is completely abandoning her, and the writing tends to get more than a little overblown. I think this is a novel that had great potential but laid it on a bit too thick and needed more character work. I wanted to rate it higher for the beautiful cover alone, but in all honesty, I can't.

[adonisguilfoyle · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Well, that was a tedious collection of cliches to waste a day on reading! Like Pet Sematary, only King actually developed a plot before miring his characters in grief and guilt, this story hinges on the loss of a child. And wow, what a study in misery that is - true to life, maybe, but tedious to plough through, especially from the perspective of the usual self-centred father caricature (and yes, in this case, Charles, your daughter's death was entirely your fault). Charles is so ridiculously pompous - sorry bookish and introverted - that I kept wanting the eponymous night wood to claim him. Violently. His internal monologues are full of literary allusions and thoughts like 'The language of transcendence was alone adequate to the Eorl Wood’s mystery and beauty'. His wife, Erin, who he was cheating on just before their daughter drowned in the bath (two more cliches) just floats through the story in a drug-induced haze.There is an attempt at a spooky backstory before all Charles' 'Woe is me!' bleating kicks in. Drawing on the author's catchphrase of life being a story in a story, a year after daughter Lissa's death, Charles and Erin inherit a family property in the UK, and promptly up sticks from their previous life of middle class academia and anguished estrangement in the US to move to North Yorkshire. Not the North Yorkshire that any UK readers would recognise, but a county still trapped in the nineteenth century, full of fog-bound moors and isolated country piles, where the locals don't add ice to drinks and intelligent women are forced to have Edgar Allen Poe's poetry mansplained to them. I think the author might have been inspired by An American Werewolf in London. Seriously: 'He stepped off the path despite the prohibitions of a thousand tales — broken every one, as such prohibitions must be, subject like us all to necessity or fate, the grim logic of the stories everywhere and always unfolding. This door you must not open, this fruit you shall not taste. Do not step off the path. There are wolves.' So they move to this Victorian Gothic heap of grey stone, called Hollow House, because Erin is a descendant of some crazy author who once wrote a twisted but nicely illustrated novel called 'In The Night Wood'. Then went mad and burned the original house down. But what did Crazy Great-Great-Grandpa Hollow see that sent him over the edge? Charles wants to find out, ever since finding a copy of The Book in his own grandfather's house as a child, and possibly write a biography. Local historian Silva volunteers to help him, in more ways than one, naturally, and they set about digging through handy boxes of the author's archives. What they find, far too late in the book for me to care, is that 'Time was a snake that bit its own tail, the old story grinding round upon the wheel of fate', AKA 'It's all happening again and only we can stop the cycle of horror!' (Another bar for the cliche tally.)I started out with high hopes for this one, really I did. I expected a quick read, and apart from Charles being an egotistical dick, the story isn't exactly challenging, but I could have done without the literary deja vu. Strained couple who have Lost a Child. Americans inheriting a haunted house in England. Locals divulging cryptic advice. Power cuts, Storms. Old diaries in code. Creepy woodland. Folklore. Ghosts. This reads like a compendium of every modern gothic novel ever. I started skimming long before Charles' great revelation about his daughter, and the connection between Erin and the Hollows was never really developed (and why was Charles so important to the story, apart from his big head refusing to allow him to believe otherwise?)Boring, Not even recommended as a library read.

[lauriebrown54 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This story is almost over the top gothic. It begins with a husband and wife, Charles and Erin Hayden, inheriting a fortune and a huge manor house in England, one surrounded with primeval forest. They are a miserable pair; he had an affair with a co-worker, their daughter died as a direct result of this, his academic career is stalled, and the wife has retreated into a haze of alcohol and prescription drugs. They hope this move will help them move on, but the house belonged to Caedmon Hollow, who wrote a Victorian dark fairy tale that Charles has been obsessed with since childhood. Erin is the last survivor of the family They find the place unsettling; they see images of their dead daughter everywhere. The forest is moving closer to the house. Charles, looking into the past to write a biography of Caedmon Hollow, meets Silva, the head of the village’s historical society. She’s an intelligent and attractive woman, and her daughter is almost a carbon copy of Charles’ and Erin’s dead daughter. You can see where this might head. The whole situation is a great set up for supernatural horror. Sadly, I ended up not caring for the book very much. Charles is an unlikable main character, even though he’s supposed to be seeking redemption. Erin is a mere shadow of a person. The other characters start with great potential, but end up just props for Charles. The ‘feel’ of the story is wonderfully full of dread, as the unknown closes in. I loved the use of Celtic mythology. Charles and Erin’s grief is portrayed beautifully, if that word can be used for grief. But the end came rushing too suddenly; it was tied up as if the author had a deadline to meet. I give it four stars for gothic suspense; can’t give it five because of the main characters.

[billiebook · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A dark, unsettling, Victorian-inspired tale, reminiscent of the works of the late Graham Joyce in the way in which it blends family/relationship dynamics with supernatural elements.

[beamis12 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

3.5 Unbearable loss and grief, a failing marriage, a literary obsession bring Erin and Charles to the dusty Manor that Erin inherited from her ancestor, Caedmon Hollow. A Victorian children's novel, the only work that Caedmon would leave before he committed suicide, stirs a fascination in Charles, one he hopes to turn into a worthy dissertation. There are, however, more things than can be rationally explained, in the woods behind the house.Mixing folklore, an obscure novel, and a newly discovered cryptogram, this is an eerily creepy read. The pages are infused with a subtle dread, the slow buildup enhances this mood of darkness. What is real, what is not? Literary allusions in the crptogram and other places, Caedmon uses references from many famous authors, Shakespeare among them, added to the mystery of what exactly Caedmon was trying to say. There is much sadness here, much mystery, some gorgeous prose, and a fascinating look at the darkness within and without. The long tentacles of a history past but not forgotten."Maybe , Charles thought, maybe stories held a germ of truth. Maybe if there weren't really any happily ever after to our once upon a times, there could at least be a hard won accommodation to the vicious world, a compromise at tale's end with bitterness and suffering.Maybe."ARC from Netgalley.

[jjbooklvr · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I enjoyed the slow burn gothic feel to this story but there was a part that I really did not like. I am torn how much it should effect the overall rating. This is one of those times I wish we could do half stars. I don't like to round up for ratings so will stick with my 3 stars.

[ouroborosangel · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I really expected this book to end horribly because of everything that came before and because of the story referenced within. When, instead, it ended well for the characters, it threw me a bit. I will need to revisit this read closer to publication.

An advanced copy of this book was provided by the publisher.