In the Night Wood by Dale Bailey: Book Review

I approached Dale Bailey’s gothic thriller, In the Night Wood, much as the protagonist, Charles, approaches the wood of the title — with curiosity and a little apprehension. I’m not normally a reader of gothic fiction but the book appealed and I was ready to take a punt so, like Charles, I stepped off my usual path. 

Unlike Charles I didn’t get lost, and nor was I disappointed. Charles is an American academic with an uncomfortable professional past, a tragic personal life and a guilty secret. He’s also obsessed with a peculiar literary piece from the past, a strange gothic fantasy, and his wife Erin happens to be the last surviving descendant of the author, Caedmon Hollow. When Erin inherits Hollow’s fantastical house and forbidding secret wood, it seems the perfect place to escape the loss of their daughter and the difficulties in their marriage. But of course it isn’t. 

It’s a beautifully-written book, with the descriptions of the tortured wood startling in their intensity. I enjoyed and believed in the characterisation, especially of Charles and Erin, though I couldn’t pretend to like either of them. I could feel for them, though, as they drift apart, tortured by guilt, he driven by his obsession with Caedmon Hollow and she increasingly dependent upon drink and opiates to get through the day. 

In places it slows down, but as they become draw into the strange complications of a past and a present life, the pace picks up as the race is on to save a child’s life and prevent history repeating itself yet again as tragedy. And because it’s gothic, and because it’s a fantasy, and because in places it’s totally weird, it kept me guessing to the very end. That’s a weakness as well as a strength because although the main part of the plot was concluded, I was left without an answer to what felt, to me, like the central theme in the book — Charles and Erin’s relationship. 

Early on the book is heavy with the phrase “once upon a time” and the emphasis on life as a story. But once upon a time implies an ending that tells us, at the very least, whether or not they lived happily ever after. This genre, of course, doesn’t require that, and Dale Bailey acknowledges it in so many words (“maybe if there weren’t really any happily ever afters to our once upon a times…”). But nevertheless I felt that the story was left incomplete. 

That apart, it was a fascinating, if dark, read and I thoroughly enjoyed it. 

Thanks to HarperCollins and Netgalley for an advance copy of In The Night Wood in return for an honest review.