Courtney Gould

The beautiful cover art is the only competent thing about this book.

The Dead and the Dark has a great hook: recent high-school graduate Logan has two dads who are minor celebrities thanks to their ghost-hunting TV show. When they have to return to the tiny, insular Oregon town where they grew up, both her dads and Logan herself have to grapple with long-ago secrets and whatever is making local teenagers vanish.

However, no one in this novel seems to (re)act in ways that are plausibly show more baseline human, let alone likely. (For instance: "There's a gravestone in this tiny town with my very unusual surname and date of birth on it. Unremarkable coincidence, nothing to ask my parents about!"; "My parents are deeply and genuinely in love and everyone can see it, but oh also one of my dads is great and the other is an absolute asshole!"; "Oh, you committed a hate crime against my family? Sure, let's hang out and drink beer in a creepy abandoned cabin in the woods!" Wtaf.) The pacing's wonky, the characterisations are shallow and inconsistent, the prose clunky, and the town of Snakebite entirely unconvincing as a real place. There are also plot holes you could drive a lorry through. (For example: The star of a network TV show gets arrested for the murder of at least one and maybe more teenagers and neither a journalist nor a lawyer turns up while he sits in the town jail for two weeks or more with absolutely no evidence against him? Huh?)

Annoyingly sloppy. show less

"What the Woods Took" is a YA eldritch horror novel following Devin and 4 other teens that have been enrolled in a wilderness therapy program. Devin, Ollie, Sheridan, Aiden, and Hannah each have a troubled past that their guardians wanted to fix by sending them to his program. While the teens explore what things they have done and why, the forest seems to also be listening. After completing their first milestone, they become separated from their counselors, Liv and Ethan, and find themselves show more stranded in a strange forest. All five have to face their own fears, pasts, doubts, and nightmares as they fight to trust each other and stay alive against the horrors in the wood.

This audiobook was narrated by Lindsey Dorcus. She did a really good job with infusing the story with emotion. Her cadence was well timed and didn't feel choppy or disjointed. Each character had a distinct voice and I knew who was speaking only partway through the book without needing the prompts (i.e. "said Ethan" or "Devin answered" etc.). Her voice didn't get carried away during the hectic scenes, she was always steady throughout without sounding disinterested. I am curious to know which other books she has narrated.

I'm in a cottage-core horror era and I have loved finding books that fit this niche. "What the Woods Took" is an eldritch horror that checked all of these boxes. Seeing these creatures bring up the people and things the teens feared most triggered my empathy and had me curious as to what the monsters would show me if I had been in this same situation. Each of the teens were unique and the author took the time to give each of them a distinct personality and flaws that could be slowly worked on throughout the novel. I really liked what each brought to the table and felt they were well written and not two dimensional.

One thing I was a bit sad that it didn't talk much about was how detrimental wilderness therapy was/is to those that do go through it. Obviously, these teens were put to the test with all that they faced. However, real teens have truly suffered in these programs and this instead was just a unique setting to get them all out into the woods.

Anyone that loves a solid YA horror novel surrounding unique creatures in a wood should absolutely read this book. It has LGBTQ representation, enemies-to-lovers slow burn, eldritch horrors, and an intense survival scenario.

Thank you to NetGalley and MacMillan Audio for allowing me to read/listen to this novel early! show less

Wow! I am blown away by how this all came together. The Dead and the Dark is about the things that lurk in dark corners, the past that cannot remain hidden, and about finding home in places you least expected.

Logan Ortiz-Woodley wants to live a normal life. She wants one place to call home instead of the many, many hotels she’s lived in, and she’d really like to make her own path. Her dads are the stars of TV’s most popular ghost hunters show ParaSpectors, so she’s spent most of her show more childhood going from one haunted place to another for her dad’s show.

Snakebite, Oregon is a typical small-town that everybody’s forgotten about. But something lurks there and teenagers are disappearing, some turning up dead, the whether is acting up and people point a finger at Logan’s dads, Alejo and Brandon.

Ashley Barton is a native of Snakebite, Oregon and her boyfriend is the first teen to go missing. She’s felt his presence ever since and refuses to believe he’s dead. With the Ortiz-Woodleys in town, his ghost following Ashley, the only person she can trust is the mysterious Logan. Ashley and Logan team up to figure out who is haunting Snakebite, their investigations reveals truths about the town, their families, and themselves that they may not be ready for.

Alejo and Brandon are so completely adorable that I cannot handle it. It does break my heart that Logan thinks Brandon hates her since she doesn’t know what actually happened. The enemies to friendship then to blossoming relationship between Ashley and Logan is so wonderful and heartwarming to see. I’m also a sucker for the enemies to love trope!

This was unique and mind-blowing book with twists and turns. I was actually shocked about what was going on in Snakebite and it was fascinating to see every couple of chapters these inside thoughts from this dark, terrifying thing that is haunting the town.

Truly, there is something that haunts the town but the beauty of Gould’s book is that it’s really the town itself, the people, the hatred, the prejudices. The more people hate and judge and discriminate the more the darkness grows and becomes more powerful. In our day and age, the message that comes across in this story is more important than ever to listen to and understand. We cannot let our own hatred become toxic, to sink so far into the soil that there is no escape. show less

Five troubled teens in a behavioral therapy program in the woods with two counselors that really have no business running it; what could possibly go wrong? Throughout the experience, each character’s lives come to light and is used against them in one way or another. As the woods grow more and more sinister, survival is the only name of the game.
Gould delivers a well written, mysteriously disturbing tale of what could go wrong in this situation. The characters and plot work together show more seamlessly and the test of inner strength is realized to create a full circle. A touch of the paranormal in this one, but it works!
*I received an arc from the publisher through NetGalley for an honest review show less