JANUARY 2019 - AudioFile
This grown-up fairy tale gone wrong features Goody, a Puritan woman who goes berry picking in a New England forest. What happens to her there is delivered by narrator Vanessa Johansson. At times spooky, and at times investigative, the story involves Goody’s suspenseful attempts to return home. Johansson gives the many female characters their own vocal personas, helping listeners differentiate the women in the woods—Goody and the various strangers she encounters. This story is best enjoyed in audio form because of its meandering plot. Johansson encourages listeners to immerse themselves in the experience. M.R. © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine
The New York Times Book Review - Eowyn Ivey
…more horror-fantasy than historical fiction…[In the House in the Dark of the Woods] takes off at a full gallop and never looks back. In just over 200 pages, Hunt evokes countless stories embedded in the American consciousness, from Grimms' fairy tales to Washington Irving's creepy stories of the early 1800s…[Hunt] has fashioned an edge-of-the-seat experience more akin to watching a horror movie. Don't go in the cellar! Don't eat that pig meat! Darkness is everywhere. And never assume you can trust the narrator. So prepare yourself. This is a perfect book to read when you're safely tucked in your home, your back to the wall, while outside your door the wind rips the leaves from the trees and the woods grow dark.
Publishers Weekly
08/06/2018
Hunt (The Evening Road) packs this eerie tale of wayward women with tinges of witchcraft and nightmarish imagery. A woman known only as Goody drifts into a colonial New England forest after getting lost looking for berries for her domineering husband and young son. Captain Jane, a rugged stranger, finds her and guides her to the secluded house of Eliza, who kindly treats Goody’s exhaustion and wounded feet. Goody flees after waking up in the night and discovering multiple moaning Elizas bent in disturbing poses. Back in the woods, Goody is tricked by the crone Granny Someone into retrieving a lost treasure from a spoiled well. When Captain Jane rescues her, only to take her aboard an airship made of human bones, Goody realizes all three women in the woods are witches. She flies homeward with Captain Jane, who insists on a stop to punish a wicked man from Goody’s past. As she approaches home alone, Goody doubts her decision to leave the woods, and her hesitations push her toward a terrifying choice. The chilling elements build slowly rather than coming as sudden shocks, and Laird’s almost soothing tone makes the surprising twists all the more frightening. This dark fairy tale will make even seasoned horror fans shudder. Agent: Anna Stein, ICM Partners. (Oct.)
From the Publisher
A New York Times Book ReviewEditors' Choice
"[Hunt] has fashioned an edge of-the-seat experience more akin to watching a horror movie. Don't go in the cellar! Don't eat that pig meat! Darkness is everywhere. . . . So prepare yourself. This is a perfect book to read when you're safely tucked in your home, your back to the wall, while outside your door the wind rips the leaves from the trees and the woods grow dark."—New York Times Book Review
"Engrossing... a game abundant in mysteries but scant in resolutions. The book's greatest strength is its striking, sensual prose."—The New Yorker
"Like Richard Hughes' In Hazard or Arthur Machen's 'The White People,' Hunt's In the House in the Dark of the Woods tells a dark story brightly, leading the reader to see and sense the things that the protagonist isn't saying, and maybe can't even acknowledge. A wonderful, luminous, sly tale that orbits around a very grim core, growing darker and darker as it goes. A stunning contemporary fairy tale."—Brian Evenson, author of A Collapse of Horses
'"A dark treat of a novel: lush, exciting and gorgeously strange."—Sarah Waters
"I adored this book and found it to be entirely spellbinding and scary and strange... It carries us along in a current of intoxicating dread, bearing witness to one woman's dreamlike journey of the soul."—Mona Awad, author of 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl
"A thrilling, magical tale that straddles two worlds: the harsh, at times grim reality of colonial New England, and the imaginative shadow world from which the oldest fairy tales are woven."—Kathleen Kent, bestselling author of The Heretic's Daughter
"With the surprise of fairy tale and fable but with the complexity of one's favorite literary novel, Laird Hunt again gives us fierce, complex women living in American history."—TaraShea Nesbit, author of The Wives of Los Alamos
"Hunt's accomplished prose creates the atmosphere of possibility and danger that lurks in the best fairy tales, where anything can happen but everything has a cost. Highly recommended for fans of that amorphous border between fantasy, horror, and literary fiction as found in the work of Kelly Link, in Joy Williams' The Changeling (1978), or in Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber (1979)."—Booklist, Starred Review
"The eerie, disturbing story of one of our perennial fascinations—witchcraft in colonial America—wrapped up in a lyrical novel of psychological suspense."—BookBub
"It's tough to give a simple description of this book, except to say that it tackles witchcraft in colonial America, providing a mythology that's sure to disturb."—Bookriot
JANUARY 2019 - AudioFile
This grown-up fairy tale gone wrong features Goody, a Puritan woman who goes berry picking in a New England forest. What happens to her there is delivered by narrator Vanessa Johansson. At times spooky, and at times investigative, the story involves Goody’s suspenseful attempts to return home. Johansson gives the many female characters their own vocal personas, helping listeners differentiate the women in the woods—Goody and the various strangers she encounters. This story is best enjoyed in audio form because of its meandering plot. Johansson encourages listeners to immerse themselves in the experience. M.R. © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
2018-07-31
Odd things befall a woman among witchlike beings in a forest in Colonial America.
The woman narrating goes walking in the woods one day to pick berries for her husband and boy and wanders "farther away from our home than ever I had before." (Clues to the undefined time and place include soldiers in red, or Redcoats, and a coastal town where a woman sits in stocks typical of Puritan New England.) After a time, the narrator is in distress, lost in the forest and injured. She will encounter three women who seem to help as they hinder her efforts to return home while they reveal special powers and pastimes. She will dive for a treasure in a filthy well and see the world change when viewed through a hole in a piece of bark. Memories will arise that might explain her own specialness. Things evolve from the strange but plausible to the strange and magical—including a flying boat "made of human skin and of human bones"—somewhat in the manner of Philip Pullman's The Golden Compass. There's an explicit reference to "Hansel and Gretel," one of the grimmer among the Grimm brothers' tales and an apt allusion for Hunt (The Evening Road, 2017, etc.). Borne along by his lyrical writing, the narrative moves from foreboding to fear to the psyche's awful freight and finally to horror. It's a journey in mood and message from Hawthorne's Hester Prynne to the Poe of "The Cask of Amontillado," and the reader yields to the final frisson in the realization of how the why precedes and suits the terrible what. An entire episode—albeit quite creepy—doesn't really fit thematically, and the ending is unfortunately both puzzling and annoying.
A bit flawed but an unusual and entertaining tale from an uncommonly resourceful writer.
