SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: In the Night Wood by Dale Bailey: https://t.co/ruNxp22NeQ— Josh (garik16) (@garik16) September 12, 2019
Short Review: 5.5 out of 10 (1/3)
Short Review (cont): A fantastical horror tale of a couple in grief moving to an estate in England for the husband to research an obscure fairy tale author who wrote a creepy book has well written imagery, but doesn't earn its final message about dealing with grief. (2/3)— Josh (garik16) (@garik16) September 12, 2019
In the Night Wood is a short dark contemporary (not urban) fantasy novel by author Dale Bailey. I hadn't heard of the book until it picked up a nomination for the World Fantasy Award, but I like to try and read through all of the works that pick up notable nominations, so I quickly reserved the book from the library.*
*The book is also available from Kindle Unlimited, but I didn't have time to read it right away, so having it on hold from the library actually not only supported my library but gave me a greater chance of reading it.
And well, In the Night Wood has the framework of a dark fantasy or even horror novel work, but I don't quite think it pulls it all off in the end. Like I said, the novel is short, but it packs a ton of revelations and resolutions into its final pages to the point where the ending feels abrupt and unearned, despite a ton of setup before those final pages. It isn't helped by the character work, which is fine but unexceptional, and the book's refusal to have characters talk to each other honestly for way way too long just to keep them in the dark. The imagery of the book is written well, so I can see how it got the award nomination, but it just didn't work for me.
----------------------------------------------Plot Summary----------------------------------------------------------
When Charles Hayden was a child, he found himself in the possession of an obscure and creepy children's novel, "In the Night Wood", by an English author Caedman Hollow. The book would carry a strange significance in Charles' life as he grew as an academic, especially after it served as his connection to his eventual wife, Erin - a distant descendant of Hollow.
10 Years later, Charles and Erin are beset by a tragic death in the family, and right around the same time Erin finds herself inheriting the estate of Caedman Hollow. Seeking someway to salvge what is left of their marriage, and their lives, Charles and Erin move across the Atlantic to the Estate to see if they can get away from their grief, with Charles using it as a project to do a biography on Hollow.
But as Charles and Erin deal with horrible grief, they begin to see things in the mysterious forests surrounding the estate. And as Charles finds clues that Caedman Hollow left behind, about what drove him to write that creepy children's novel, he begins to suspect that the events of the past are only repeating themselves....and that the novel's fantasy horrors may be more real than imagined....
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The setup of In the Night Wood seems pretty basic and easy to explain. You have the grieving couple in the main characters, over the loss of a child, with one of the main characters having made a tragic mistake of infidelity. You have a fictional in-universe fantasy story seemingly based upon a real place, which the main characters begin to investigate, and find may be more real than they ever thought. And you have those two things converging with the monstrous horror the grievous couple keep seeing, which the couple can't be sure isn't just them going mad as a side effect of their own grief.
In short, there's little about In the Night Wood that you may not have seen done before in another work, which again as I've said in other reviews, isn't necessarily a problem if it was executed well. Unfortunately, I don't really think it was executed well here. The book spends most of its pages from Charles' points of view, but spends more than a few chapters from Erin's instead, except nearly all of Erin's chapters are her dealing with grief in misery and pills - which is totally believable and understandable, but probably didn't need point of view chapters. Meanwhile while Charles' grief is also written well, his jerkish behavior towards Erin at times is really annoying and at times seems mainly there to prolong conclusions being reached by the characters by them not sharing information, which is kind of annoying. If I'm yelling internally for a character not to take steps to have an affair on-page (and to his credit, it doesn't happen), it's probably not a good thing for it to be the main character we're supposed to sympathize with.
And more positively, the imagery of the book, particularly the fantastical elements in the forest that the characters see, is done really well, leading quite excellently to the sense of supernatural dread over what has happened and what will happen. There's definitely a feeling of real creepyness as the book goes on, which is definitely what the book is going for. But the book compresses the revelations of what happened in the past (most of which the reader will have guessed) and the resolutions of that creepiness into the last few pages so quickly that it just feels incredibly abrupt and unsatisfying. The book seems to be trying to establish a theme about hope triumphing over grief in the end, but the theme just comes out of nowhere after pages and pages of dealing with grief in misery, that it's just....eh.
Certainly not a bad book, but one which didn't work for me and its ending felt unearned.
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