The Dark Between The Trees

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First of all, my gracefulness and major thanks to NetGalley and Rebellious Books for allowing me the pleasure to read an ARC of this book. This review has no spoilers, and is quite detailed, so I would appreciate your patience. Some readers might take issue with the ambiguity of the ending but I don't know how else you'd have finished this novel. I don't think it's a spoiler to say that I don't think there was ever going to be a happy ending to this one. It could potentially have set it up for a sequel, which I would happily read. The Dark Between the Trees is folk horror of the most classic kind, refreshed for the new century.”— Esquire

Today, five women are headed into Moresby Wood to discover, once and for all, what happened to that unfortunate group of soldiers. Led by Dr Alice Christopher, an historian who has devoted her entire academic career to uncovering the secrets of Moresby Wood. Armed with metal detectors, GPS units, mobile phones and the most recent map of the area (which is nearly 50 years old), Dr Christopher’s group enters the wood ready for anything. Or so they think. There are a lot of characters in this story, and at first I found this too much, that it made the story overwhelming and difficult to get to grips with. But something pushed me through these early struggles, and I'm glad they did, since with every new chapter, and every new detail, I became more and more invested in all of these characters. Their conflicts, both internal and relational, are so well written. Haunting and heart-stopping. The Dark Between the Trees marks the arrival of a bold new voice in British horror.”— MR Carey, author of The Girl with All the Gifts I absolutely loved the group of women who make up the "present " day group as they seek to discover the truth surrounding the legends of these woods and what has happened to the soldiers from the "past" that wandered in after an ambush.As for the overall plot it’s fairly straightforward and when you come right down to it not much actually happens rather than is witnessed by the characters, and, by the very end, the story definitely doesn’t resolve itself in any way that I would’ve expected. I feel like that was the point though all along. Sometimes you don’t find the answers and there’s nothing you can do about it. Or the ones that you do find are not what you wanted.

The characters didn't grab me but for a horror story, they were solid. They had different motives and distinct personalities and while I didn't care if they lived or died, I could empathize with their situation and motivesI love this story, which I first came across in Diane Purkiss’s The English Civil War: A People’s History. We know that, at this time, roving groups of soldiers had a reputation for going into villages and stealing everything—whether they needed it or not, sometimes whether they could carry it or not. Three centuries later, scientists looking at the effects of starvation at the end of World War II discovered that prolonged starvation causes people to become hoarders—as in, it literally changes something in their brain chemistry. And that puts a whole different spin on these seventeenth century soldiers, right? Suddenly they’re not spiteful and petty. Suddenly they’re desperately hungry men who don’t know where their next meal is coming from, or the one after that, and it’s changed something structural in their brains. But before the 1940s, nobody knew about that, so their theories about what was happening were different. We’re all working with incomplete information and trying to make the best sense of it that we can. Every historian is doing that, and every single one of my characters, and every reader too. That’s fascinating to me, and it was really something I wanted to play with in this book. Seventeen men enter the wood. Only two are ever seen again, and the stories they tell of what happened make no sense. Stories of shifting landscapes, of trees that appear and disappear at will... and of something else. Something dark. Something hungry.