No number of completed risk assessments can keep you safe.
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| Cover design by Dominic Forbes |
What The Dark Between The Trees manages to do is provide everything that any horror writer who's ever dabbled in the Ivory Tower could dream of – drama, danger, discovery, mystery, magic, beasts and witches and unholy mysteries that lie well beyond the reach of any scholarship or human comprehension – while also getting the nature of academia exactly right.
Dr Alice Christopher is a historian, who has always been fascinated by an event that took place in Moresby Wood during the English Civil War in 1643: the ambush and defeat of a troop of soldiers, of whom a third were killed and the rest fled into the woods. Only two came back out again, and only one survived after to tell a chilling tale of impossible landscapes and shadowy monsters. Now, after decades of trying to find funding to do a proper on-the-ground investigation of this location, Alice has finally secured a very small grant, sufficient to lead a very small research team on a very small trip to explore the spot. With her come her PhD student, Nuria, weeks away from submitting her thesis; two members from National Parks department, and a representative from the Ordinance Survey. That last is quite important because maps of Moresby Wood are hard to come by, and the two that do exist -- one from 1731 and another from 1966 – don’t agree with each other. (For the avoidance of doubt, this is foreshadowing.)
The narrative proceeds across the two timelines. Alongside Alice’s team, we get interspersed paragraphs following the troop of soldiers, starting with their desperate retreat into the woods. The events of the two groups parallel each other: They each camp under an enormous oak tree in a clearing; they each wake the next morning to discover that the tree is gone. They try to make their way out of the wood, and instead find that the geography is changeable. They tell stories about local legends associated with the woods: a family of charcoal burners who went in and never came out; a monster named the Corrigal, whose nest lies in the heart of the forest. Their unity becomes fractured, riven by doubts in the leadership – an internal stress exasperated by existing battle wounds (for the soldiers), or the failure of GPS equipment (for the researchers), and the terrible weather (for both). Then people start disappearing and dying mysteriously, perfectly fine one moment, and the next moment gone – or, worse, cut in two with no warning beyond a shimmer in the air. (I should mention – there is a lot of blood in this book.)
Things progress from bad to worse, until eventually . . . well, let’s just say that a book with centuries-separated timelines and a creepy forest that seems not to worry about reality and sanity has options when it comes to allowing those timelines to interact.
The plot and world-building (well, Forest-building) are largely vibes-based. The details of why Moresby Wood is so weird are never really clarified; the strangely veiled identity of those ambushing soldiers 1643 goes unrevealed; the eventual fate of many of the characters remains ambiguous; and the nature of the mysterious shimmer that slices people in half is left as an exercise for the reader. And yet, oddly, these narrative choices didn’t leave me unsatisfied. In the same way that trying to render something as incomprehensible as Moresby Wood compatible with a mere map only betrays a fundamental misunderstanding about its whole deal, trying to render something as misty and vibey as The Dark Between the Trees into a concrete set of events and actions also misses the point. It’s not that kind of book. Read it for the experience, not for the story.
But also, read it for the pitch-perfect rendition of UK academic research. This level of accuracy can only come from someone who has been there. Take, for example, the PhD student Nuria. Her second supervisor is an academic nemesis of Alice’s, which means that any time Nuria disagrees with Alice, her opposition is seen in the light of a larger feud that really has nothing to do with her. (This type of thing absolutely happen: A PhD student in my programme had to avoid taking certain classes to satisfy her coursework requirements because they were taught by her supervisor’s extremely toxic ex-spouse, both of whom, bafflingly, still remained members of the same department.) Or take the other three members of the team, who represent non-academic ‘stakeholder’ project partners: yes, the involvement of the Ordinance Survey works well to support the plot point about disagreeing maps, but it also reflects a growing pressure in UK academia to demonstrate ‘impact’, or a demonstrable benefit or change that one’s research can effect outside the university context. I can just imagine Alice writing her ‘Impact and Knowledge Exchange’ section of the grant bid now: In partnership with the Ordinance Survey, this project will prove vital to supporting the badly-needed modernisation of existing maps of the Moresby Wood area. Currently, the most recent map is half a century old, and ...
And then, of course, there are the risk assessments. Because, as every University insurance administrator knows, if you’ve filled out the risk assessment, then nothing bad will happen! I can only hope my next research trip does not bring me near Fiona Barnett, because somehow I doubt the University of Glasgow’s SafeZone App is going to prove sufficient to protect me from her vision.
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Highlights
Nerd coefficient: 7/10, an enjoyable experience, but not without its flaws
Highlights:
Vibey vibes
Unfathomably scary Woods
Historical mysteries that do not illuminate the present
Pitch perfect academics
Reference: Barnett, Fiona, The Dark Between the Trees, [Solaris 2022].
CLARA COHEN lives in Scotland in a creaky old building with pipes for gas lighting still lurking under her floorboards. She is an experimental linguist by profession, and calligrapher and Islamic geometric artist by vocation. During figure skating season she does blather on a bit about figure skating. She is on Mastodon at wandering.shop/@ergative, and on Bluesky at https://bsky.app/profile/ergative-abs.bsky.social
