SubscribeWhen I first picked up this book, I was hoping for a fairy tale. The brief description of it mentioned a dark woods, with an even darker history that would unfold as the story did. It hinted at something sinister living in the woods, and a family who gets caught up in all that somehow. It also sounded really scary! It seemed like this book would be a great horror/fairy tale story, and I was excited to see what I would find between the covers.
At first, I was completely disappointed by this book. Its one of those books that takes a long time to describe everything, and does it all slowly, so as to build up to the big events. Now, sometimes that works, but here, it just didn’t work for me.
I was also becoming unimpressed by the writing itself. For example, one page starts with a paragraph describing the woods as “though a vast dark shape was flexing all its legs”, and later, in a different paragraph on the same exact page describes the woods “as if the dark or something else as vast was stalking many-legged under the cover of the trees”. In this book about the dark woods, Campbell names many of his characters woodland sounding names. One of the main characters is named “Heather”, and another, arguably more important character, is named “Sylvia”. As in Sylvan, as in Woods! It was all painfully obvious, and all bad, very, very, bad.
Then, somewhere along the way, this book got better. Then it got pretty good. I was not expecting it to. Basically, the story is a simple one. Heather and Sylvia are sisters, now adults, who grew up next to Goodmanswood, somewhere in England. Sylvia moved to America, and elsewhere to research for books she writes, and Heather stayed there with their mother, Margo, and Heather’s son (now also an adult), Sam. When the book starts, Lennox, the partiarch of the family, is now in the nearby nuthouse, having gone crazy from a moss he found while researching parts of the woods.
Sylvia returns, out of the blue, and stays with the family. Soon, it is revealed that Sylvia is pregnant. She won’t say who the father is, but knows. The actual father doesn’t know for a big part of the book, but then figures it out. It’s all a little V. C. Andrews. Anyhow, the story of what’s going on with this family becomes more and more entwined with whats going on in the nearby woods. The reader spends a long time wondering if there is really something out there, or, if it’s just the characters slowly going mad. The end leaves more questions than answers, but does seem to vaguely answer a few questions before setting itself up for a sequel. Overall, I think it might have made a better movie than a book. At least that way, when you are dragging through all the description of the woods that seems to be going nowhere for such a big portion of the story, you would have something to look at.
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