The cute, awkward romance at the beginning wasn't what I was expecting and is not really right for our publication, but it seems nicely written. Thanks very much for letting me check it out.

This gripping novel, a mix of horror and fantasy, traces the slow disintegration of a marriage following a child's tragic death. It unfolds in a setting rich or even dense with fairy-tale tropes: an ancient family home surrounded by primeval forest in the English countryside. Exploring the same ground as novels like MYTHAGO WOOD and POSSESSION, as well as Lindsay Clarke's underappreciated THE CHYMICAL WEDDING, the novel builds a satisfying atmosphere of creeping, eerie dread, but the ending feels pat and unearned, as if the writer had wandered too far into the woods and could not find his way out again except by the most familiar of paths.

In the Night Wood has all the elements for a gripping dark fairy tale - a wonderfully descriptive creepy setting, a lost child, and subtle and not so subtle ties between current and past events. Unfortunately, I wasn't gripped, and other than a few sightings here and there, I found very little in the way of fantasy. In fact, I found most of the story to be rather depressing. The author gives us a premise that hints at something original in the genre, but instead falls back on too many references to classic literature. Granted, those references work well with the dark tone of the story, but I would've liked a little more originality. That aside, my real problem with this story lay in the characters. Flawed or unreliable characters in a tale like this can work well, but there has to be something redeemable there. I didn't find that with Charles. He's certainly flawed, but I didn't see a single thing to like about this man. He's made mistakes and even acknowledges them, but he doesn't learn from the experiences, nor does he attempt to change. Charles' wife, Erin, is little more than a caricature in the story. We know she's grieving and has turned to drugs and alcohol, and that pretty well sums it up. I can empathize with her loss, but with so little development, it felt more like reading about a stranger in the newspaper - we have the bare bones details but no depth. We learn more about Silva during the will Charles cheat or won't he period than we ever learn about Erin. She does eventually come out of her substance induced haze and take some action, but for me, it was just too little, too late. Which is also how I felt about the fantasy aspect of the book. It's not particularly lengthy, coming in at just over two hundred pages, but most of it is heavy and felt much longer than it actually is. In fact, it took me over a week to finally finish it. It was way too easy to set aside for something that held my interest. The author is talented, there are lots of pretty words and the scene setting is brilliant, but there just wasn't much done with that until the big finish. In the end, the story was more a depressing account of two grieving parents and a failing marriage than dark fantasy. That does come in for the last act, but it felt rushed, and much like my thoughts about Erin, it was way too little, too late. This seems to be one of those books that people will either love it or hate it and after reading the blurb, I really wanted to love it. Sadly, I fall into the latter category and come away quite disappointed.

Charles Hayden is watching his life and his marriage go down the drain. An Affair. His daughter dying. He and Erin have just drifted apart. Then his wife inherits the Hollow family home. Hollow House. Maybe the house, the money, the new start will make everything ok? Charles and Erin don't realize that Hollow House and the Eorl Wood surrounding it hold dark secrets. Very dark secrets.

This story unfolds like a deep, dark, demented fairy tale. An old house sitting in the middle of the deep, dark woods. Legends about disappearances, murder, The Horned God. And an ancestor that wrote a strange, mesmerizing novel about the woods before killing himself. Visions of a dead little girl. What a creepy, awesome story! I loved it! I started reading the book on Halloween night and it ended up being a total binge read. The story sucked me right in and kept me reading until the end.

Dale Bailey has written many short stories and several novels. In the Night Wood is the first book by Bailey that I've read. I enjoyed this story so much that I'm definitely going to read more of his work. I like his writing style. He doesn't hit readers in the face with roaring monsters and jump scares. The horror in this novel was more subtle...more chilling...the sort of scary that sneaks out of the woods at night and waits at the end of your bed while you sleep. I'm definitely reading more by this author!

The cover art for this book is just awesome.

*I voluntarily read a review copy of this book from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt via NetGalley. All opinions expressed are entirely my own.*

A horror novel that goes more for subtly creepy than gorey and terrifying. Charles and Erin are a married couple from North Carolina with problems: their only child, Lissa, has just died, Charles had an affair, and in the aftermath they've both lost their jobs. Salvation comes in the form of Hollow House, an immense Victorian mansion in the Yorkshire countryside, complete with a huge shadowy forest on the grounds and an estate worth millions of dollars, to which it turns out Erin is the distant heir. Her ancestor, Caedmon Hollow, is how she and Charles met in the first place: he wrote a single fantasy novel (a sort of darker Alice in Wonderland) that they both read as children. Charles, an English professor, decides to revive his career by writing a biography of Hollow using the house's archives. Erin doesn't much care what country she's in, lost in memories of Lissa, overdosing on her prescribed antidepressants, and drinking all day long. As so they both relocate to rural England.

The dense imposing forest that surrounds Hollow House lends an uneasy tone to their lives right from the beginning, but it gets worse once they both begin to glimpse a mysterious horned figure under the trees. There is also a series of young girls who look disconcertingly like Lissa, all missing or dead, all with bad fathers. Fatherhood ends up being a major theme of the novel, fatherhood and the price of parenting a child. I don't want to say too much more, since a great deal of the pleasure of In the Night Wood is just figuring out what's going on, but the book draws heavily on English folklore like Cernunnos and Herne the Hunter, the Wild Hunt, Tamlin, and fairy bargains. The writing is ominous and eerie, and does an excellent job of evoking the fear of being lost in the woods. It's not perfect, but it is a very good Gothic novel for the modern age.

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2580541245

This story builds very slowly, which is appropriate for the atmosphere it creates. The couple is grieving a loss and trying to continue with their lives, though neither one is doing well at all. It's a very grim plot in general. And the reason I thought it was just "ok" is that there's not much of a fantasy element until the very end. There is a "tale" throughout, but there's a lot of questioning whether or not certain elements are real or if someone is simply drunk, drugged or crazy. It just wasn't all that satisfying to me.

Charles Hayden and his wife Erin first met and bonded over the obscure Victorian fantasy novel In the Night Wood, by Erin’s distant relative Caedmon Hollow. After their daughter’s tragic death on her sixth birthday, however, the two are estranged, trapped in their grief, when they discover that Erin has inherited Hollow House, the ancestral manse where Hollow had lived and written the book, on the edge of one of the oldest forests in Britain. They cross the Atlantic in the hopes of escaping their own demons and, in Charles’ case, of finding material for a biography of the mysterious author. Instead, they find themselves drawn deeper into Caedmon Hollow’s world, where the forest is deep and dangerous, and little girls can get lost forever in the fulfillment of a dark bargain made long ago.

This is exactly the type of book I like—gothic; carefully structured, with people and events echoing and referring to one another; allusive; and deeply rooted in British folklore. I would love to give it 5 stars, and if half stars were allowed I might consider four and a half. Its biggest flaw, however, which I could not ignore, was its portrayal of Charles’ wife Erin, especially considering that she ends up playing a pivotal role at the climax. To me, Erin barely exists at all, as she is consumed by her grief for her daughter. There is reference to her having been an attorney, I believe, but the only time I can ever remember seeing her as a person is at the time of her meeting with Charles. Maybe it’s necessary for the plot and I’m suffering from a failure of empathy (I can’t even imagine how devastating it must be to lose a child), but her obsessive wallowing starts to seem self-indulgent, and it’s hard for me to believe she could rouse herself to the extent she does. Charles also comes off badly in his apparent willingness to allow her to essentially destroy herself, though again, it could be argued that this is necessary to the story. I also found the ending a bit abrupt. Some of the aforementioned problems I had might have been assuaged if we had seen something of what followed and—assuming that Erin might have begun to heal from her grief—a fuller, more rounded picture of her.

I received a copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

In the Night Wood started off really interesting, but became somewhat dark and depressing as I got further and further into the book. So much so that it made me want to stop reading it altogether. I stuck with it, and found that it picked up in the last chapter, but by then it was too late for me. There was no redemption for the book and it left me feeling sort of sad due to the depressing content (little girls that all look like the dead daughter of the two main characters of the book) and the fact that the two main characters don't really seem to have much personality that endears the reader to them. Charles seems like such a sweet, dorky, likable character in the beginning chapter of the book, but by the end I despised him for his lack of spine and his tendency to have no will power to resist breaking his marriage vows. His wife, Erin, is totally likable in the beginning of the book as well, but by the end she is dosing her grief with pills and alcohol and we see nothing else of her, and know nothing much else about her than the fact that she's a grief stricken mother who is drowning her grief and losing herself in the process.
By the end of the book, it all gets wrapped up, the "Once Upon a Time" has a "The End" but the process of getting there is long and tedious and not one that I would care to repeat.
I do thank #NetGalley for the opportunity to read it and give an honest review. And I apologize that it isn't a more favorable one.

This author packed a lot of story into less than 300 pages! The writing is lush without being dense. If you loved The Hazel Wood, this is its adult sister. It is one of the best books I have read this year. I couldn't put it down. It took me firmly by the hand and said, "Come with me."

This surelly is a very different fairy tale. Pretty dark and full of suspense. I liked how the environment is well developed and you can easily be drawn to the cold, humid and gray house bordered by the wood full of mystery.
I also liked how we are introduced to the characters and their internal thoughts.
I just wished we could have had a faster pass in some chapters and have a larg4r epilogue once the mystery was solved, since the ending was really open.

3.5 stars, rounded up for exceptional atmosphere.

In the Night Wood is a gorgeously creepy, atmospheric tale that blends a number of high gothic tropes into a modern ghost story.

The plot is average to perhaps a tick above average for the genre, competently done with no major flaws but also with nothing that makes it a standout.

Atmospherically, however, it's a triumph. The delightful slow creep of the not-quite-rightness of the townspeople and the house mixed with the overt menace of the woods makes for a perfect backdrop to the principal story.

Charles and Erin made for genre-appropriate (if not particularly likable) protagonists. Though this frustrated me at times, it almost had to be this way. Could we, as readers, really stomach what they endured and how they reacted to it if they had been too lovable? Further, would the plot be able to proceed as it did without the tremendous sense of guilt that radiates from both of them?

While the denouement failed to grip the way the very best gothic offerings do when they reach their crux, I appreciated the way the author provided a concrete ending while leaving the source of the menace in the woods slightly nebulous.

A good effort in all, and a particular joy if you like to "feel" your gothic novels like I do.

This book is an interweaving of Charles' story and that of a Victorian fairy tale (one that only exists within this book as far as I know) - it draws parallels between the events of Charles' life and superstition, leaving you as the reader to decide what's real and what isn't.

It's a very atmospheric book, featuring a grieving couple that have moved from North Carolina to a rural village in the UK. It has some wonderful cliches on the move, which are classics for a reason! The gothic fairytale style is prevalent throughout the book, which binds the past, present and fictional together - it's a beautiful writing style but wasn't really enough to keep me interested.

The overall feel of this book is very sad, it's mostly about the grief of two parents and the author quite aggressively holds back on the backstory which is then fed in chunks every so often. I prefer either a more subtle approach to plot reveals or starting off with all the information to hand and then see where the narrative takes me.

If you're a more forgiving person and reader than I am, with a love of gothic fairy tales and classic celtic mythology, give this book a shot!

As a young boy, the protagonist, Charles, discovered a book called "In the Night Wood" by Caedmon Hollow and it remained in his mind ever since. As an adult, he sought the book out at university and became a professor teaching literature. He then vows to write a biography of Caedmon Hollow, and he'll have the perfect space to do it in as he goes to live at Hollow House where the author used to live. Bailey's writing is vivid and rich like a savoury butter, especially for the first half of the book. He definitely knows his bibliographical studies quite well with his descriptions of rare books, which was nice to see from a Book History standpoint but might get a bit too detailed for the average reader.

After a tragedy that has created a huge rift in Charles's marriage to Erin, and they go to Hollow House, their marriage is barely hanging on by a thread and they really don't have much else of a choice of where to go because of their situations and to hope that this can be the mark of a new beginning of sorts. Charles, as mentioned above, is determined to write his biography of Caedmon Hollow. The story within a story within a story structure works well here, with the legends going that Caedmon himself used to live at Hollow House (hence the name) but maybe he saw things like The Horned King and the other creatures. There are ciphers to be solved and other mysterious goings on to contend with as well as workers of the house and the townspeople who each seem to be hiding something.

Erin, Charles's wife, over-medicates and drinks herself into a stupor to deal with her grief and anger while Charles buries himself in his work and tries to ignore his own repressed sadness and grief. He also tries to pretend there's not a problem in his marriage, or at least won't acknowledge it outright even though he wants to several times.

Although I found much of the first half of the book gripping, exciting, and page-turning and I couldn't wait to see what happened next, I found that the author dwelled a bit too much on the marital situation between the protagonists and there were some repetitive elements that bogged down the pacing. By the time that things picked up again, it was difficult to renew my interest until near the end.

My other gripe with the novel is that I didn't like either of the protagonists. Some of the other characters were great, but it's asking the reader a huge investment to spend an entire novel with protagonists who are central to the book, and if the reader doesn't find them likable and doesn't root for them, it's difficult to sustain their interest. I understand, of course, that given Charles and Erin's situations that it wasn't easy to make them likable given their circumstances and all they've been through, but as I reached the end and discovered the horrid truth of what happened to cause them such tragedy, I hated Charles even more.

Then again, the most interesting characters are those that make us feel something, even if that happens to be strong dislike in this case, because there's nothing worse than "perfect" and dull characters, so I suppose in that regard, one could argue Bailey did a good job with picking these folks for his protagonists. In any case, that's just a personal reflection and others may have thought they were fine.

Nonetheless, the action picks up towards the end of the book, and I found the ending to be mostly satisfying and it fit with the overall tone of the story. I would definitely recommend horror and fantasy fans pick this novel up, because it's a great autumn read and is one that I think fans of "Sleepy Hollow" and that sort of vibe of horror story will really be quite interested in.

Now that the weather is finally turning gloomy, you might be looking for an atmospheric read. Look no further! This book blends folklore, English countryside, mysterious books, missing children, and a wood that beckons....

I enjoyed Bailey's short stories that I also read this year, and I may have a slight preference for those because they were more along the lines of dark fantasy and sometimes humorous, always full of humanity. Sometimes I felt trapped in this book because it gets a bit circular, and you know that the characters are doing dangerous things and the author is just going to make you watch it happen! But that's part of the overall tone of the novel that is so effective. Some of the characters feel more like archetypes than individuals, but again, that suits the book too since there is a layer in it of another book, also called In the Night Wood.

At the heart of the story is a damaged marriage, with both people destroyed by grief with an added undercurrent of infidelity that hasn't even started to be dealt with. That may be the greater horror in the end.

I’ve actually read Dale Bailey before. Ages ago. I vaguely recall an old paperback, liking it. But the main reason I wanted to read this book was the title/cover/description combination promising a dark fairy tale. I love fairy tales and dark is absolutely the best variety of them. And so this was one. A fairy tale for adults. About two adults who move to a great old manor in a pastoral England to try to get past the death of their young daughter only to discover the nearby woods just might be darker and scarier than a mere collection of trees. It’s a near perfect Victorian gothic premise and although it takes place in the present, it may very well have been a timeless tale. There is a mysterious Horned King (a very traditional English wood being) awaiting, nay, expecting a sacrifice. There is a bibliomystery (I can never resist those). There is a family drama. Quite a lot in such a slim volume that definitely doesn’t read slim. And yet the star of the show here is the writing, Bailey’s hauntingly atmospheric narrative spellbinds the reader, spirits them away into a place on the very edge of madness where supernatural and natural comingle in such a way as to make mere mortals seem like playthings. The character writing is also terrific, the quietly dissolving marriage of Charles and Erin, with him trying to manage his guilt with a project of discovering the secrets of the family he’s married into (yes, there’s even a cypher) and her giving into the overpowering grief and sliding into something of a chemical coma with interludes of obsessive drawing…it’s a relationship a real as it is devastating. But really this is a story about a book, a book that once brought Charles and Erin together, a legendary children’s story that really isn’t for children, and the terrifying truth behind its inspiration. Of course, it can just be read as an allegory about grief and forgiveness, but it’s so much more fun to go the fairy tale way. Sad, lovely, eerie…this was a thing of beauty, particularly for anyone who’s into psychological mindtwisters. Might not sing for everyone with its meditative pace and Charles’ questionable moral character, but personally I enjoyed it tremendously. And it’s a good October read too. A literary dark fantasy with a distinctly scary undertones. Great read. Recommended. Thanks Netgalley.

[Note: I was provided an advance copy of this book by Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.]

There's something about a dark, English wood. It's a fantasy trope in and of itself, and for good reason - woods can be scary, full of dark, gothic horrors, fae mythology, and all sorts of nasty things. And English woods -- well, you don't have to look far to find novelists that use the primeval woodlands as a source of inspiration and for a suitably spooky atmosphere.

And boy do we get atmosphere in Dale Bailey's new novel "In the Night Wood." The book tries to meld the ordinary with the extraordinary, juxtaposing the traditional opening of fairy tales -- "Once upon a time" -- with protagonist Charles' discovery of a spooky leather-bound Victorian gothic novel while on a childhood trip to England, and his subsequent meeting of the author's scion while the two were in graduate school together. It's a seemingly happy story of love, marriage, and literature. But as you might expect from the title, the darkness is never far from the surface.

"In the Night Wood" is at one level a story of horrible (but mundane) tragedy -- the death of a child, the unspeakable sorrow and horror that springs from it, and the dissolution of a marriage. Charles and his wife Erin travel to England to live at the typically gothic and remote Hollow House in the Yorkshire wilderness, on the edge of the even darker, spookier Eorl Woods. Erin is the last descendent of the aforementioned Victorian author and has inherited the gothic manor house, complete with a double wall encircling the property and decaying, Celt-era ruins in the trees.

Charles hopes that dropping everything and living in Hollow House can help he and his wife heal from the tragedy that has ripped apart their lives and their marriage. The opening half of the novel depicts their journey to Yarrow and the ways that they attempt to reconnect with each other within the confines of this ancient English wilderness, with little success.

Bailey does a capable job of setting the tone of Hollow House and the nearby village of Yarrow -- it is appropriately quietly menacing and spooky, with a cast of eccentric characters. The central mystery is slow to emerge and is almost overshadowed by the quiet desperate despair of the two main characters.

To avoid revealing too much, one of the central themes revolves, unsurprisingly, around child death - there's the death of Charles' & Erin's young daughter Lissa, but also a mystery of a missing child, and a mythological story of sacrifice, and hovering over it all is a local myth of the Night God (or King), who is said to haunt the Eorl Wood. The Cademon Hollow novel at the center of everything, the one Charles found as a boy and dictated the path of his life, becomes a touchstone for the entire mystery.

While it is slow to get going, there are fantasy elements that emerge over the course of the book. Visions of faces and apparitions in the foliage come and go, and presences are felt within the cavernous Hollow House. The setting is appropriate, and anyone who are attracted to Gothic novels or settings will find a lot to like in this novel.

However, the denouement feels rushed and forced, and when the gothic horror does reveal itself there is a mixed message whereby it feels as though the author doesn't really know in which way he wanted to take things. Is this a story about being human in a mythic setting, or a mythic novel in total? I'm not sure Bailey fully knows, and it comes across in the novel as both, yet somehow neither. The end of the novel comes abruptly and I feel as if it could've used another chapter or two to wrap up narrative loose ends, several of which were left flailing around in the English wind.

There are things to like about "In the Night Wood." The juxtaposition of human tragedy and an all-too-human mystery at its center are compelling reading, as is the spooky setting of Hollow House and its environs. But the fantastical elements almost hinder the story -- I think I might have appreciated it more if Bailey had either made the fantasy elements either totally in the background, or gone "all in" as a fully fantasy novel. In the end, it's a little of both, and it keeps it from being a fully satisfactory reading experience.

In the Night Wood by Dale Bailey was such a great story! I love the Victorian Era and I loved how Dale Bailey weaves elements from the Victorian Era and modern day.

Since the beginning there was something off with this book. It wasn’t the writing style or the idea. It was the main character. I didn’t like him from the beginning to the end and that killed all my enthusiasm for the book itself.
In addiction to that I’m not a great fan of scary books, so it cleary wasn’t the right book for me.

When he was just a young boy, Charles Hayden discovered a mysterious Victorian children’s book called “In the Night Wood”.  Years later, Charles is a failing scholar who is obsessed with the book that influenced his life. His wife is a distant relative of Caedmon Hollow, the author of "In the Night Wood".  When she inherits Hollow’s home, he moves there with her to run away from their shared tragic past--the recent loss of their six-year-old daughter.  Charles hopes that he can use this opportunity write a biography of Caedmon Hollow.  Digging deep into the past is never a good idea, however, and it quickly becomes apparent that “In the Night Wood” was inspired by the forest surrounding Hollow’s home.  But how much is truth, and how much is fiction? 

The writing style is one of the book's greatest strengths, and Caedmon Hollow's Victorian style house, the woods surrounding it, and the neighbouring town are all beautifully described.  However, I felt that the story somehow managed to feel too rushed, while very little actually happens. The story doesn’t have much substance.  In the Night Wood is quite short, but based on content, it could have easily been a novella or even a short story.

The major appeal factor of this book is that Bailey has created his own legend.  The story of “In the Night Wood” with the horned king and a little girl named Laura--a little girl who is so similar in both name and appearance to Charles' lost daughter.  However, Hollow's book is not quite developed enough to my liking, and instead Bailey pulls from Shakespeare and other well-known writers throughout history for later plot points, including a cipher that Charles must decrypt.

I didn’t particularly enjoy this book. Charles Hayden is a most despicable main character. He hasn’t learned from past mistakes. He cheated on his wife, and on his daughter’s birthday, his “secret birthday gift” to his now six-year-old daughter was that he was going to break up with his mistress. What a wonderful present. You’re too kind.  This would all be fair, but in present day he’s almost cheating on his wife again with another woman, another scholar with a similar name. He didn't learn from his mistake, which would also be okay, if he learned his lesson before the book ended.  He didn't. There’s no “I should have learned” moment or time when karma comes to bite him in the ass.  He doesn't get his comeuppance, which makes an unlikable character such as this one inexcusable.  He's also sexist, not only the way in which he views his wife, but in the way he views other women. The female scholar he works with on Hollows' biography is said to have her "prickles" because she won't allow him to patronize him.  He likes her despite her "prickles".  Ugh!

Throughout the story Charles Hayden reflects on his daughter’s tragic death and how he feels responsible. The way he says it makes you think that he isn’t actually responsible, that it’s just a reasonable level of survivor’s guilt.  A way for Bailey to make an unlikable character have some substance.  Then it’s revealed how the daughter actually died. Charles is 100% responsible for her death, which makes his woe-is-me attitude even more disgusting.  In the plot line of the story, a local child has been kidnapped.  Charles doesn’t react beyond how you or I would react to the thought of someone else’s child being kidnapped, despite the fact that he literally went through the experience of losing his daughter less than a year before. He should have had empathy for the parents of the missing child. He should have--at the very least--had it remind him of his own lost daughter and bring him to shed a single tear down his cheek. To be honest, I’m not entirely sure Charles is human.

The unlikability of Charles Hayden is exacerbated by the fact that his wife, Erin, isn’t well fleshed out. She’s grieving her lost daughter. That’s basically all we know about her. She doesn’t do much else except for wonder if her husband is cheating on her again once they move to Caedmon Hollow’s home.  It’s actually mentioned at one point that Charles can’t leave her because he needs access to the house she inherited. I repeat, "Ugh".  

This book has numerous intellectual discussions; however they’re mostly about things I’ve heard about a million times before--quotes like “Murder most foul” by Shakespeare, a definition of “automatic writing”, the story of Oedipus, and a brief mention of Occam’s Razor, to name a few.  

I recommend this book to those who want to read a book with a lot of literary references and a strong sense of place--the old Hollow House is beautifully described, as is the dark and treacherous woods that surround it.  If you do decide to read this, try not to mind an extremely unlikable main character who doesn’t grow or get what’s coming to him.

At first, I thought this book would just be another in the genre of scary wood near a haunted estate near an isolated English village. Those element are there, but it's so much more! I was kept reading, excitedly going from page to page, by the beautiful, careful writing, the characters of Erin and Charles, and the supporting characters as well. I loved this book.