The eerie, disturbing story of one of our perennial fascinations -- witchcraft in colonial America -- wrapped up in a lyrical novel of psychological suspense.
"Once upon a time there was and there wasn't a woman who went to the woods." In this horror story set in colonial New England, a law-abiding Puritan woman goes missing. Or perhaps she has fled or abandoned her family. Or perhaps she's been kidnapped, and set loose to wander in the dense woods of the north. Alone and possibly lost, she meets another woman in the forest. Then everything changes.
On a journey that will take her through dark woods full of almost-human wolves, through a deep well wet with the screams of men, and on a living ship made of human bones, our heroine may find that the evil she flees has been inside her all along.
In the House in the Dark of the Woods is a novel of psychological horror and suspense told in Laird Hunt's characteristically lyrical prose style. It is the story of a bewitching, a betrayal, a master huntress and her quarry. It is a story of anger, of evil, of hatred and of redemption. It is the story of a haunting, a story that makes up the bedrock of American mythology, told in a vivid way you will never forget.
Laird Hunt is the author of eight novels, a collection of stories, and two book-length translations from the French. A 2024 recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship for Fiction, he is also the winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Fiction, the Grand Prix de Littérature Américaine, the Bridge Prize and a finalist for the National Book Award, the Pen/Faulkner and the Prix Femina Étranger. Hunt’s reviews and essays have been published in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and many others. He teaches in the Department of Literary Arts at Brown University and lives in Providence.
What People are Saying About This
Author of 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl - Mona Awad
“I adored this book and found it to be entirely spellbinding and scary and strange. Laird Hunt renews our collective fear of the archetypal woods, reimagining the dark realm of ancient nightmares as a place of irresistible wonders and horrors. Spun like a fairy tale, the novel carries us along in a current of intoxicating dread, bearing witness to one woman’s dream-like journey of the soul. Like her, we are lost, possibly forever, to its spell.”
Author of The Grip of It - Jac Jemc
"Every Halloween I read Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown," haunted most by what we don't know about the young wife. In Laird Hunt's newest, we're finally made privy to the temptations such a woman encounters when repeatedly intercepted by a cast of powerful, dangerous women deep in the woods. The language and mystery will bind your thoughts: an addling hex of a book."
Bestselling author of The Heretic’s Daughter - Kathleen Kent
“In the House in the Dark of the Woods is 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. It’s into this pagan and dream-like forest that the heroine must travel, finding her way home by confronting her deepest fears and most primal desires.”
