In the House in the Dark of the Woods..., Laird Hunt
In the House in the Dark of the Woods..., Laird Hunt
2 Rating(s)
List: $18.99 | Sale: $13.29
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In the House in the Dark of the Woods

Author: Laird Hunt

Narrator: Laird Hunt

Unabridged: 5 hr 20 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 10/16/2018


Synopsis

The eerie, disturbing story of one of our perennial fascinations -- witchcraft in colonial America -- wrapped up in a lyrical novel of psychological suspense.

"Once upon a time there was and there wasn't a woman who went to the woods." In this horror story set in colonial New England, a law-abiding Puritan woman goes missing. Or perhaps she has fled or abandoned her family. Or perhaps she's been kidnapped, and set loose to wander in the dense woods of the north. Alone and possibly lost, she meets another woman in the forest. Then everything changes.

On a journey that will take her through dark woods full of almost-human wolves, through a deep well wet with the screams of men, and on a living ship made of human bones, our heroine may find that the evil she flees has been inside her all along.

In the House in the Dark of the Woods is a novel of psychological horror and suspense told in Laird Hunt's characteristically lyrical prose style. It is the story of a bewitching, a betrayal, a master huntress and her quarry. It is a story of anger, of evil, of hatred and of redemption. It is the story of a haunting, a story that makes up the bedrock of American mythology, told in a vivid way you will never forget.

About Laird Hunt

Laird Hunt is an award-winning novelist, short-story writer, essayist, and translator from the French. A finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, he has won the Anisfield­-Wolf Award for Fiction, the Grand Prix de Littérature Américaine, and Italy's Bridge prize. His reviews and essays have been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times, among others. He teaches at Brown University and lives in Providence.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Kat on September 12, 2020

a24’s the witch mixed with grimm’s fairytales vibes. i am lost but i liked it!!......more

Goodreads review by karen on October 31, 2021

OH NO SPOOKTOBER IS WINDING DOWN "I help those I can. Those who stray into the wood and deserve helping." "Do I deserve helping?" "Of course you do, poor thing. How could you even ask?" "It seemed easy to ask." "You are tired." "Some I saw this day were not helped." "Not all deserve it. And need to be show......more

Goodreads review by Lala on April 04, 2020

Book 25 of 30 for my 30 day reading challenge. [URL not allowed]-g......more

Goodreads review by Maciek on March 31, 2019

I told my man I was off to pick berries and that he should watch our son for I would be gone some good while. So away I went with a basket. What drove me to read this book was the blurb from Brian Evenson, an author I admire, who described it as "wonderful, luminous and sly", and called it "a stunnin......more

Goodreads review by Lark on December 23, 2018

Using traditional fairy tale elements, Hunt tells a story that starts with fairy-tale calm and rapidly descends into madness and horror. The novel strongly recalls the work of the great German Romantics, in a way I never would have guessed a modern author could evoke. One of my favorite reads of all......more


Quotes

A New York Times Book ReviewEditors' Choice

"[Hunt] has fashioned an edge of-the-seat experience more akin to watching a horror movie. Don't go in the cellar! Don't eat that pig meat! Darkness is everywhere. . . . So prepare yourself. This is a perfect book to read when you're safely tucked in your home, your back to the wall, while outside your door the wind rips the leaves from the trees and the woods grow dark."—New York Times Book Review

"Engrossing... a game abundant in mysteries but scant in resolutions. The book's greatest strength is its striking, sensual prose."—The New Yorker

"Like Richard Hughes' In Hazard or Arthur Machen's 'The White People,' Hunt's In the House in the Dark of the Woods tells a dark story brightly, leading the reader to see and sense the things that the protagonist isn't saying, and maybe can't even acknowledge. A wonderful, luminous, sly tale that orbits around a very grim core, growing darker and darker as it goes. A stunning contemporary fairy tale."—Brian Evenson, author of A Collapse of Horses

'"A dark treat of a novel: lush, exciting and gorgeously strange."—Sarah Waters

"I adored this book and found it to be entirely spellbinding and scary and strange... It carries us along in a current of intoxicating dread, bearing witness to one woman's dreamlike journey of the soul."—Mona Awad, author of 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl

"A thrilling, magical tale that straddles two worlds: the harsh, at times grim reality of colonial New England, and the imaginative shadow world from which the oldest fairy tales are woven."—Kathleen Kent, bestselling author of The Heretic's Daughter

"With the surprise of fairy tale and fable but with the complexity of one's favorite literary novel, Laird Hunt again gives us fierce, complex women living in American history."—TaraShea Nesbit, author of The Wives of Los Alamos

"Hunt's accomplished prose creates the atmosphere of possibility and danger that lurks in the best fairy tales, where anything can happen but everything has a cost. Highly recommended for fans of that amorphous border between fantasy, horror, and literary fiction as found in the work of Kelly Link, in Joy Williams' The Changeling (1978), or in Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber (1979)."—Booklist, Starred Review

"The eerie, disturbing story of one of our perennial fascinations--witchcraft in colonial America--wrapped up in a lyrical novel of psychological suspense."—BookBub