The writing is dense with allusions and details, the narrative twisting and turning in the same way the Night Wood distorts the senses of anyone who wanders into it A modern gothic horror done right. "Bailey’s novel has every aspect of gothic horror: the drafty manor, the shady servants, the tortured protagonists. Soon enough, they’ll learn that the darkness under the trees is but a shadow of the darkness that waits inside us all. Soon enough, Charles and Erin will venture into the night wood. And every morning the fringe of darkling trees presses closer. In the primeval forest surrounding Caedmon Hollow’s ancestral home, an ancient power is stirring, a long-forgotten king who haunts the Haydens’ dreams. Erin, paralyzed by her grief, immerses herself in pills and painting images of a horned terror in the woods.
In the neighboring village, Charles meets a woman he might have loved, a child who could have been his own daughter, and the ghost of a self he hoped to bury. Deep in mourning from the loss of their young daughter, they pack up their American lives, Erin gives up her legal practice, and the couple settles in Hollow’s remote Yorkshire mansion.
In this contemporary fantasy, the grieving biographer of a Victorian fantasist finds himself slipping inexorably into the supernatural world that consumed his subjectįailed father, failed husband, and failed scholar, Charles Hayden hopes to put his life back together with a new project: a biography of Caedmon Hollow, the long-dead author of a legendary Victorian children’s book, In the Night Wood, and forebear of his wife, Erin.
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