Hunt (The Evening Road) packs this eerie tale of wayward women with tinges of witchcraft and nightmarish imagery. A woman known only as Goody drifts into a colonial New England forest after getting lost looking for berries for her domineering husband and young son. Captain Jane, a rugged stranger, finds her and guides her to the secluded house of Eliza, who kindly treats Goody's exhaustion and wounded feet. Goody flees after waking up in the night and discovering multiple moaning Elizas bent in disturbing poses. Back in the woods, Goody is tricked by the crone Granny Someone into retrieving a lost treasure from a spoiled well. When Captain Jane rescues her, only to take her aboard an airship made of human bones, Goody realizes all three women in the woods are witches. She flies homeward with Captain Jane, who insists on a stop to punish a wicked man from Goody's past. As she approaches home alone, Goody doubts her decision to leave the woods, and her hesitations push her toward a terrifying choice. The chilling elements build slowly rather than coming as sudden shocks, and Laird's almost soothing tone makes the surprising twists all the more frightening. This dark fairy tale will make even seasoned horror fans shudder. Agent: Anna Stein, ICM Partners. (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

*Starred Review* Hunt's (Neverhome , 2014) latest follows a woman in colonial New England as she takes a strange, wandering journey through a mysterious wood. As the nameless protagonist travels, she encounters other women who seem to dwell in the woods, such as the dashing Captain Jane with her wolf-skin cloak, the cheery yet possibly tormented Eliza, who seems blithely trapped on her little patch of land, and a mysterious girl in yellow who bounds through the trees. Interwoven throughout are the heroine's memories of her stern husband and young son, or of her childhood with her cruel mother and weak father, with each new memory providing more pieces of the nameless woman's past and clues to what drew her into this verdant, haunted landscape in the first place. 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).--Alan Keep Copyright 2018 Booklist

Having explored the dark realities of American history, Anisfield-Wolf Book Award winner Hunt (Kind One) goes fantastical in this beautifully delivered example of literary horror, set in colonial New England. A Puritan woman walks into the woods to pick berries for her husband and son and, after falling asleep, awakes to a strange new world she cannot escape. She's helped fleetingly by Captain Jane, who returns later to rescue her after cackling Granny Someone shoves her down a filthy well to rescue a precious object. Meanwhile, the woman spends time with Circe-like Eliza, who enchants her with kindness, well-stocked larder, and spooky games. Eliza has increasingly disturbing visions-looking through a bit of bark, she sees not golden-haired Eliza but a sunken-eyed hag. Yet much as she desires to leave, the real world she recalls-unkind parents and a pious, abusive husband-isn't promising either. If the women she encounters are indeed witches, evoking witchcraft's place in America's past, they're also guides of sorts-or perhaps projections of our innermost memories, desires, and fears. -VERDICT Occasionally puzzling in purpose, this atmospheric book still absorbs like the best dark fairy tales and will leave readers chilled to the bone. [See Prepub Alert, 4/9/18.]-Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

IN laird HUNT'S newest novel, "In the House in the Dark of the Woods," there is a game in which the players act out a fairy tale and then abruptly switch roles, so Hansel becomes Gretel, Gretel becomes the witch. "Their favorite had been the game of the wolf eating the little girl. They had gnawed on each other's ribs and gobbled each other's entrails and torn out each other's hearts." Partway into this slim, dark novel, it is clear that Hunt is playing this same game with his characters. Is the stranded woman really the witch, the witch the victim? And who is the little girl? It is an unnerving reminder that this is, at its roots, a horror story. The first pages, however, comfort us with the familiarity of a fairy tale. A nameless woman wanders from home to pick berries, only to lose her way in the forest. She sees a little man she calls a "first folk." She misplaces a bonnet that was a gift from her dead mother. Night comes. With the universal tone of "once upon a time," Hunt conjures the stories we heard as children, and we know the land his characters inhabit could be anywhere, at any time. But there are hints - a journey across an ocean, Puritan beliefs - to set us in colonial New England. Those who have read Hunt's other recent novels will note similarities - a historical American backdrop, intriguing female main characters, a colloquial first-person voice with a distinctive cadence and poetic cleverness. In "Neverhome" a seed is even planted for this newest novel, when a mother tells distorted fairy tales so that "Hansel and Gretel" ends as "Rumpelstiltskin." "In the House in the Dark of the Woods," however, is something different. It is more horror-fantasy than historical fiction, and where "Neverhome" and "The Evening Road" are grounded, if at times meandering, this one takes off at a full gallop and never looks back. In just over 200 pages, Hunt evokes countless stories embedded in the American consciousness, from Grimms' fairy tales to Washington Irving's creepy stories of the early 1800 s. And while there are no outright references to the witch trials, he seems to pay homage to Salem with the names of his characters, Eliza and Goody. BUT there is also Captain Jane, a menacing Granny Someone and the sense that other cultural influences are at play. When Goody climbs into Captain Jane's ship made of human bones and skin, and they fly into the clouds, Hayao Miyazaki's animated films leap to mind. People turn into pigs, a blob at the bottom of a well morphs into a scream, and in order to survive you have to learn the rules of the game. It is tempting to seek a moral in the end. Maybe, don't talk to strangers. Or, goodness prevails over evil. Or is this just a recasting of an old tale with modern sensibilities? But Hunt isn't that predictable or didactic. Instead he has fashioned an edgeof-the-seat experience more akin to watching a horror movie. Don't go in the cellar! Don't eat that pig meat! Darkness is e verywhere. And never assume you can trust the narrator. 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. EOWYN IVEY is the author of "The Snow Child" and "To the Bright Edge of the World."

Odd things befall a woman among witchlike beings in a forest in Colonial America.The woman narrating goes walking in the woods one day to pick berries for her husband and boy and wanders "farther away from our home than ever I had before." (Clues to the undefined time and place include soldiers in red, or Redcoats, and a coastal town where a woman sits in stocks typical of Puritan New England.) After a time, the narrator is in distress, lost in the forest and injured. She will encounter three women who seem to help as they hinder her efforts to return home while they reveal special powers and pastimes. She will dive for a treasure in a filthy well and see the world change when viewed through a hole in a piece of bark. Memories will arise that might explain her own specialness. Things evolve from the strange but plausible to the strange and magicalincluding a flying boat "made of human skin and of human bones"somewhat in the manner of Philip Pullman's The Golden Compass. There's an explicit reference to "Hansel and Gretel," one of the grimmer among the Grimm brothers' tales and an apt allusion for Hunt (The Evening Road, 2017, etc.). Borne along by his lyrical writing, the narrative moves from foreboding to fear to the psyche's awful freight and finally to horror. It's a journey in mood and message from Hawthorne's Hester Prynne to the Poe of "The Cask of Amontillado," and the reader yields to the final frisson in the realization of how the why precedes and suits the terrible what. An entire episodealbeit quite creepydoesn't really fit thematically, and the ending is unfortunately both puzzling and annoying.A bit flawed but an unusual and entertaining tale from an uncommonly resourceful writer. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.