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    In the Night Wood
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    In the Night Wood
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    In the Night Wood
    Audiobook7 hours

    In the Night Wood

    Written by Dale Bailey

    Narrated by John Banks

    3.5/5

    ()

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    About this audiobook

    A FOREST. A BOOK. A MISSING GIRL.

    NOMINATED FOR THE WORLD FANTASY AWARD AND THE SHIRLEY JACKSON AWARD FOR BEST NOVEL
    BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR – TOR.COM

    Charles Hayden has been fascinated by a strange Victorian fairy tale, In the Night Wood, since he was a child. When his wife, Erin – a descendant of the author – inherits her ancestor’s house, the couple decide to make it their home. Still mourning the recent death of their daughter, they leave America behind, seeking a new beginning in the English countryside.

    But Hollow House, filled with secrets and surrounded by an ancient oak forest, is a place where the past seems very much alive. Isolated among the trees, Charles and Erin begin to feel themselves haunted – by echoes of the stories in the house’s library, by sightings of their daughter, and by something else, as old and dark as the forest around them.

    A compelling and atmospheric gothic thriller, In the Night Wood reveals the chilling power of myth and memory.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateFeb 7, 2019
    ISBN9780008329181
    Author

    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.

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    Reviews for In the Night Wood

    3.5/5

    61 ratings10 reviews

    What did you think?

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    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 3/5
      Erin and Charles Hayden are struggling to get over the death of their daughter. Unexpectedly Erin inherits a mysterious family property in Yorkshire called Hollow House. When they move into the house they find it very unsettling and holds lots of secrets.This book is a gothic tale with the classic rambling old house, family secrets and a nearby forest. For me this book would be righg up my street. The story also is full of refrences to fairy tales, dark myths and folk lore. One major story is that of the Horned King and the Wood Folk that live in the forest.This book I found ok. The story does cover the loss of a child, guilt, depression and a failing marriage. I did find at times that the story was a little repetitive and grim. I enjoyed the fairy tales elements along with the local folk lore but even this became a little bit repetitive. There is also a family secret to be solved in amongst everything else to give the story a little interest.A very promising gothic tale but a bit of a slow burner. It held my interest for most of the way but I have to admit to skipping parts that for me were just descriptive passages. The story is very wordy and very descriptive, at times just a little too much. However I enjoyed the story and think it would make a good tv drama for the darker nights.
    • 4/5
      A kind of meditation on guilt and loss wrapped in a supernatural covering. Reads almost as some sort of minimalist chamber play.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      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.
    • 2/5
      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.
    • 2/5
      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.
    • 4/5
      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.
    • 4/5
      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.
    • 4/5
      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.
    • 3/5
      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.
    • 3/5
      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.