This is the third “wilderness therapy gone wrong” book I’ve read this year (the others being Wilderness Reform by Matt and Harrison Query and Cuckoo by Gretchen Felker-Martin), and while I’m a fan of this horror sub-genre, What the Woods Took was fine when the other two books were both better than fine (or, in the case of Cuckoo, mind-blowing). 

 

Courtney Gould has a great storytelling style, and I’ve enjoyed her past books. I love her ability to smudge the horizon line between mundane and supernatural without making it seem like the monstrous aspect of her books would be utterly insane. It’s all too easy to imagine something ancient and unknowable living in the larger forests of the Pacific Northwest, with their huge trees and soaring mountain peaks. People enter these forests all the time and disappear, or come out completely changed. 

 

A large part of my issue with this book is that the story didn’t seem to have a central theme or message that stood out to me, and in a horror novel that’s not a good thing. I imagine the main point that the book was trying to make was that trauma is something you always carry with you and only you can do the work to shift how you carry it, but even that feels nebulous to me. By the time I got toward the end of this book I felt like I had invested all of this time reading the book and there was no real payoff. 

 

It was interesting and had a great premise, but not the intrigue or charisma of its contemporaries in the genre. 

 

I was provided a copy of this title by the publisher and author via Netgalley. All thoughts, opinions, views, and ideas expressed herein are mine and mine alone. All reviews rated three stars or lower will not appear on my social media. Thank you.