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Sunday 15 October 2023

The Night in the Woods by Kristopher Triana


Description from Goodreads:

"When Jennifer receives a message from Scott Dwyer after twenty years without contact, her first reaction is one of excitement. Scott was her first love, and now that she’s in her forties and in the middle of a divorce, nostalgia for her youth gets the better of her.

Scott invites Jennifer to his house in Redford, the very same town she grew up in. It’s a place she’s made great effort to put behind her, for not all her childhood memories are sunny. When she accepts Scott’s invite and returns to her old hometown, she struggles with mixed feelings, especially when she learns of the death of Steven Winters, one of her and Scott’s childhood friends.

Scott invites three other people from their past to honor Steven’s memory—Corey, Traci, and Mark. But the group is more than old friends. They share a dark secret that has troubled them for decades. Now it’s time to face their traumatic pasts. Together, they must unravel the mystery of what happened that night in the patch of forest behind Scott’s house, a place once known as Suicide Woods.

From the author of Gone to See the River Man comes a chilling novel that reminds us old ghosts are the ones that haunt us most."

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I have never read anything by this author before but I do enjoy a good horror book every now and again, unfortunately, whilst this showed a lot of promise, it didn't hit the mark for me.

An old friend passes away and a group of his friends are invited to honour him by getting together in the town they grew up in.  Slowly, we learn that something horrendous happened to them during a camp out on Halloween when they were teenagers which led them to drift apart.

The characters are really well developed however, herein lies one of the problems; there is just too much information about their lives which makes the story drag on.  It picks up (mostly) when we start to find out what happened in those woods all those years ago but then it goes downhill again and becomes something quite unbelievable even for a horror book and I found myself flicking the pages to get to the eventual outcome which, unfortunately, was a bit of an anti-climax.

It's a shame really because it had all the makings of a really good horror/supernatural book but there was just too much talking about the characters, their lives and how they felt about each other rather than focussing on the horror in the woods.

My thanks must go to the author, Cemetery Dance Publications and NetGalley for enabling me to read and share my thoughts of The Night in the Woods.

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