In European folk and fairytales, a journey through the woods represents the characters' coming of age-their passage from the pastoral, relative security of familial and familiar hearths into a fraught, shadowy place where metaphors for social anxieties lurk around every corner. Only with wit and friendship can one come out the other side, though they do so irrevocably changed - sometimes liberated through newfound independence, but always burdened with new knowledge.
This pattern is reworked to gripping effect in Courtney Gould's latest novel, What the Woods Took. A truly fantastic balance between the sensitive, painful humanity of Laurie Halse Anderson and real-world intertextuality of Stephen Graham Jones, Gould's book is about five troubled teenagers who find themselves enrolled in the inaugural session of a wilderness "therapy" program. Brash butch lesbian Devin (whose experiences with the US foster system have left her counting down to her upcoming 18 th birthday) and the much more reticent Ollie (who isn't so much looking forward as hoping he'll make it out of the program in time to say goodbye to his dying grandmother), are quickly established as the POV characters. And it's through their young eyes that we're introduced prickly, pugnacious Sheridan, pious, anxious Hannah and upbeat, eager Aiden-all of whom have vastly different ideas and expectations about the next fifty days of no phones and no-holds-barred hiking through the wilds of Idaho.
But what starts as an uncomfortable, risk-agreeable experience supervised by two clearly incompetent twenty-somethings slowly devolves into a nightmarish, dangerous fight for survival when their so-called counselors vanish in the middle of the night. Now, five teens from suburbia must make it through a month on the trail with food, water, and healthy coping mechanisms all in short supply. But they soon realize there are far more deadly things waiting in the shadows than starvation and teenage strife. Things that want to kill them...or worse.
The horror is two-fold, both supernatural/metaphorical and the more tangible dangers of being uncared for. The book opens by explaining that the setting and framing device are taken from true stories shared by survivors of the Troubled Teen Industry. The fact that so many of these programs are run by people with no qualifications to provide child care (because that is what the protagonists fundamentally are: scared, scarred children) or mental health care or care of any sort, really, is driven home again and again.
This is also a story about power. Who has it, who gets it, and who takes it-and the trauma that can result when violence enters the equation. Each of the teens seems to personify the fight, flight, fawn, or freeze response when the narrative opens, though we get more complexity and layers to their coping mechanisms throughout. The narrative seems to grow with the characters in that way, and I found myself just as gripped by their choices as the propulsive action and horror elements.
The term "moral ambiguity" is used widely and loosely in reviewing, but I was impressed by Gould's similar ability to maneuver her readers' sympathies through the character whose perspective each page was filtered through. We see each person as the hero of their story, and it is only as the story goes along that the cracks in those individual narratives open up to reveal the bigger and uglier conflicts and lack of social support or acceptance that have led them to this terrifying place. Each of the five teens makes mistakes with real consequences, and the emotional weight of those consequences is fully expressed without narrative moralizing. Readers become intimately acquainted with each of their anxieties and aggressions, and it makes what growth we do see all the more powerful.
It called to mind a brilliant Japanese film called . With superficial thematic similarities, writer* and director Hirokazu Kore-da's 2023 feature revolves around children who respond to difficult circumstances with behavior that is difficult for their caregivers to respond to. Though the film does this through the lenses of the caregivers as well, both it and Gould's novel play with and on viewer's sympathies and sentiments to reveal a complicated, nuanced, deeply human story-one that passes no judgment on the moral ambiguities that spring from wanting to protect what is dearest to us.
Speaking of loose film comparisons, people expecting the lurid dramatism of Girl, Interrupted will be disappointed in the best way. Gould's writing is much more grounded, compassionate, tightly plotted and resistant to pat or reductive simplifications of mental illness and the pain that can breed it. Her teenagers can be cruel, but the cruelty never feels spiteful or self-indulgent or as a set-up for some grand, cliched moral epiphany. The characters' barbed words are clearly reactive and/or motivated by consistent, well-plotted and well-written factors that aren't always obvious at the moment of violence, but become apparent later on.
I really enjoyed this book and plowed through the ~300 pages in a single evening. It'll certainly get your blood pumping on a sluggishly cold winter evening! If I had to have a quibble, it would be the way the story echoes certain Native American folklore without so much as mentioning the history and cultural context behind them, though I am aware that it wouldn't be fair to expect that level of cultural knowledge from these POV characters. I will add that interested readers can check out the Never Whistle in The Dark anthology for similar, shorter stories from indigenous American perspectives. It's another great read for cold, dreary winter days.
Who Will Enjoy This: People looking for a good folk horror, wilderness survival thriller, or a moving story about difficult people learning to love and that they can be loved in turn. Fans of messy teenage coming-of-age stories where flawed choices have sometimes dire consequences but it does not feel like the teens are being punished by the narrative for them. Reader who appreciate well-written, well-rounded characters.
Who Might Think Twice: People who would rather not read about trauma around bodily autonomy and detailed descriptions of physical injury. People who encountered a few of Junji Ito's panels or Clive Barker's short stories and decided creepy distortions of the human form wasn't for them in either visual or textual form, no thank you. There are no illustrations here, only text, but the descriptions are more than enough for more imaginative readers...
*Despite his many screenwriting credits, he was editor and director, but not a writer on Monster.
Content warnings: physical violence, discussions of terminal illness, descriptions of gore, flashbacks and discussion of previous sexual assault, substance use, opioid addiction