In the night wood

Review by Booklist Review

A grieving American couple inherit a Victorian manor in a picturesque English village and are thrust into a gothic tale of sinister woods, dark bargains, and child sacrifice. Charles and Erin Hayden move to Hollow House to research the enigmatic Caedmon Hollow, Erin's distant ancestor, who wrote In the Night Wood, the dark fairy tale Charles has made the focus of his academic career. The move is also an escape from the ghost of their life before their daughter's death. As Charles hunts for secrets in Hollow's archives, uncovering a mystery about Hollow's own daughter, and Erin self-medicates and obsessively draws, they see strange visions in the woods an ominous horned figure, an ornate gate, and a lost child the meaning of which eventually becomes terribly clear. Bailey (The Subterranean Season, 2015) weaves literary allusions and folkloric motifs together with gorgeous prose to create this grief-imbued story, which suffers slightly from disproportionate pacing and a disservice to Erin's character, who has little agency. This will appeal to fans of psychological horror, fairy-tale retellings, and metanarratives.--Krista Hutley Copyright 2018 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Bailey (The Subterranean Season) infuses his eighth novel with a sinister forboding that excellently villainizes its bucolic English setting. American couple Charles and Erin Hayden arrive at the estate of Victorian writer Caedmon Hollow to research Hollow's reclusive and tragic life. Carrying the grief of their daughter Lissa's death and their failing marriage, the Haydens throw themselves into their respective obsessions: for Charles, uncovering Hollow's dark secrets, and for Erin, taking prescription pills and sketching their daughter's likeness. Erin's depression is her only character trait, rendering her two-dimensional in comparison to Charles. Apparitions of Lissa and a horned figure haunt the perimeter of the forest behind the house, recalling the story of a child sacrificed to the Horned King in the pages of Hollow's "In the Night Wood." With the discovery of a cipher and the help of a local historian who has a daughter uncannily similar to his own, Charles realizes the horrors of "In the Night Wood" are closer to fact than fiction. Bailey's eerie prose centers readers firmly and successfully in his seductive and frightening night wood. Agent: Matt Bialer, Greenburger Associates. (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

Grieving the loss of their young daughter, Charles and Erin Hayden move into the English manor house once owned by author Caedmon Hollow. Erin inherited the house as Hollow's only living descendent, and the couple hopes the change will help them heal their relationship. But isolated in the old house and surrounded by the dark woods that inspired Caedmon's macabre fairy tale, their grief is magnified. Whether awake or asleep, they are haunted by images of their daughter, as well as the specter of an elven king beckoning them to the forest. While Erin pops prescription meds in an effort to dull her pain, Charles becomes obsessed with Caedmon and what inspired him to write the book that has captivated him since his boyhood. Similar in tone and setting to Brendan Duffy's House of Echoes, Bailey's (The Subterranean Season) crossover fantasy will test readers' credulity. Verdict This super creepy read may draw in fans of magical realism; however, a disappointing ending and a florid writing style will keep it from having widespread appeal.-Vicki Briner, Broomfield, CO © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

A couple in crisis moves to an old manor house for research on a Victorian fantasy novel and finds the story may not be as fictional as it appears.Charles and Erin Hayden fell in love in a university library soon after discovering that the obscure Victorian book that's been haunting Charles' life was written by an ancestor of Erin's. Soon after the death of their young daughter in an accident, they learn that Erin has inherited Hollow House, the former home of Caedmon Hollow, the author of In the Night Wood and the man Charles has spent his career researching. With nothing to keep them in the U.S., they move to Yorkshire and find themselves ensconced in the manor house with a groundskeeper, cook, and no idea what they're doing. Charles throws himself into his research, connecting with the young woman who runs the local historical society and her daughter, almost a twin of the daughter he lost, as Erin drowns herself in wine and pills. As stranger and stranger things begin happening around the manor, though, they'll have to face their grief to prevent another tragedy. Bailey's (The Subterranean Season, 2015, etc.) novel has every aspect of gothic horror: the drafty manor, the shady servants, the tortured protagonists. The writing is dense with allusions and details, the narrative twisting and turning in the same way the Night Wood distorts the senses of anyone who wanders into it. The writing does get a bit convoluted and hard to follow at times, but it's in keeping with the atmosphere of subtle dread that permeates the novel. The book is surprisingly short, and there's a lot of buildup to a very quick climax, which would have benefited from more time. The succession of reveals in the frantic last 30 or so pages, however, is tense and disturbing, satisfying for any horror fan.A modern gothic horror done right. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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Hollow House came to them as such events befall orphans in tales, unexpectedly, and in the hour of their greatest need: salvation in the form of a long blue envelope shoved in among the day's haul of pizza-delivery flyers, catalogs, and credit card solicitations. That's how Charles would pitch it to Erin, anyway, sitting across from her in the night kitchen, with the envelope and its faintly exotic Royal Mail stamp lying on the table between them. Yet it felt to Charles Hayden like the culminating moment in some obscure chain of events that had been building, link by link, through all the thirty-six years of his life ​-- ​through centuries even, though he could not have imagined that at the time. Where do tales begin, after all? Once upon a time. In the months that followed, those words ​-- ​and the stories they conjured up for him ​-- ​would echo in Charles's mind. Little Red Cap and Briar Rose and Hansel and Gretel, abandoned among the dark trees by their henpecked father and his wicked second wife. Charles would think of them most of all, footsore and afraid when at last they chanced upon a cottage made of gingerbread and spun sugar and stopped to feast upon it, little suspecting the witch who lurked within, ravenous with hungers of her own. Once upon a time. So tales begin, each alike in some desperate season. Yet how many other crises ​-- ​starting points for altogether different tales ​-- ​wait to unfold themselves in the rich loam of every story, like seeds germinating among the roots of a full-grown tree? How came that father to be so faithless? What made his wife so cruel? What brought that witch to those woods and imparted to her appetites so unsavory? So many links in the chain of circumstance. So many stories inside stories, waiting to be told. Once upon a time. Once upon a time, at the wake for a grandfather he had never known in life, a boy named Charles Hayden, his mother's only child, scrawny and bespectacled and always a little bit afraid, sought refuge in the library of the sprawling house his mother had grown up in. "The ancestral manse," Kit (she was that kind of mother) had called it when she told him they'd be going there, and even at age eight he could detect the bitter edge in her voice. Charles had never seen anything like it ​-- ​not just the house, but the library itself, a single room two or three times the size of the whole apartment he shared with Kit, furnished in dark, glossy wood and soft leather, and lined with books on every wall. His sneakers were silent on the plush rugs, and as he looked around, slack-jawed in wonder, the boisterous cries of his cousins on the lawn wafted dimly through the sun-shot Palladian windows. Charles had never met the cousins before. He'd never met any of these people; he hadn't even known they existed. Puttering up the winding driveway this morning in their wheezing old Honda, he'd felt like a child in a story, waking one morning to discover that he's a prince in hiding, that his parents (his parent) were not his parents after all, but faithful retainers to an exiled king. Prince or no, the cousins ​-- ​a thuggish trio of older boys clad in stylish dress clothes that put to shame his ill-fitting cords and secondhand oxford (the frayed tail already hanging out) ​-- ​had taken an instant dislike to this impostor in their midst. Nor had anyone else seemed particularly enamored of Charles's presence. Even now he could hear adult voices contending in the elegant chambers beyond the open door, Kit's querulous and pleading, and those of his two aunts (Regan and Goneril, Kit called them) firm and unyielding. Adult matters. Charles turned his attention to the books. Sauntering the length of a shelf, he trailed one finger idly along beside him, bump bump bump across the spines of the books, like a kid dragging a stick down a picket fence. At last, he turned and plucked down by chance from the rows of books a single volume, bound in glistening brown leather, with red bands on the spine. Outside the door, his mother's voice rose sharply. One of the aunts snapped something in response. In the stillness that followed ​-- ​even the cousins had fallen silent ​-- ​Charles examined the book. The supple leather boards were embossed with some kind of complex design. He studied it, mapping the pattern ​-- ​a labyrinth of ridges and whorls ​-- ​with the ball of his thumb. Then he opened the book.     Excerpted from In the Night Wood by Dale Bailey All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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