The Dark Between The Trees by Fiona Barnett

​There are some forests that don’t let go. Some woods you can’t enter twice. Or leave. Moresby Wood is one of those. So much more than a mere accumulation of trees.
There have been legends about it, stories told and retold, of witches, of a beast dwelling there. Modern day doesn’t take to legends kindly, wants to analyze and disprove them. And so a small team of women led by a professor, obsessed with local past, set off to explore the Moresby Woods. Their goal is to retrace the steps of the Parliamentarian soldiers who got lost there and never left all the way back in 1643.
The modern team is equipped with the latest in GPS tech and outfitted to a tee, but the place they enter is too forbidding, too dark, too hungry…can anyone be really prepared for that?
Will they fare more impressively than the soldiers centuries ago did?
Read on and find out.
The novel is told through alternating storylines, past chapter/present chapter style, and, while essentially it can be boiled down to people wandering the creepy woods…the author does her best to make it exciting and scary.
It’s a very atmospheric read, you can practically feel the trees closing in around you, cutting off the sunlight. Quite right too, since this is a book best read in the dark.
Slightly repetitive since its protagonists are likely doing loops, slightly distanced because of the character engagement (somewhat low), but overall it does the job right – creates a terrifying Blair-Witch-style-can’t’leave-them woods that makes you glad you glad to stay out of the nature. After all, some things in nature are just…unnatural. Or too natural, maybe. Or supernatural. Anyway…you get the idea. Pretty good read, especially for a debut. Thanks Netgalley.