Cover Image: The Dark Between The Trees

The Dark Between The Trees

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A perfect spooky season read!

Five women head into the Moresby Woods….Dr Christopher - obsessed with what happened there many years ago, the other ladies, each with their own role to play in the expedition (not quite) blindly following her lead…

The old stories…the monster….absolutely ridiculous old tales…

Switching between the past and the ladies, this is a great creepy read, a must for the spooky season! It left me with a chill..

My thanks to Netgalley and Rebellion for the advance copy in exchange for an honest review

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I found the book to be engaging but I would have liked the creature to be a little more fleshed out. There were some unanswered questions that could have been resolved. Other than that, I found it a creepy read, but in a good way.

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*3.5*

I struggled with this rating a little bit. Like I enjoyed it, you know the forest setting was spot on. I really felt like I was there and you get that isolation unsettling feeling along with the characters. The book did a great job at making you feel disoriented. The compass never worked, the direction and items changed. You know it was made to make you feel confused which it certainly did. One thing that I struggled with was the alternating point of views. We would have the past and something would happen and then it would cut to the present and the same thing would happen. I just preferred the past point of view because all this creepy stuff was happening for the first time, when we got to the present it just seemed unnecessarily repetitive. I would’ve preferred one or the other. And by the time we got to the final scene I just didn't care that much at that point and how it ended didn't seem like the same story that I started with.

Thank you to NetGalley and Solaris for a free copy in exchange for an honest review.

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Thank you NetGalley for this ARC, in exchange for an honest review!

I thought that this book started off strong. My only initial complaint was that the character descriptions were so brief, that I had a hard time remembering who was who. You can tell that the characters with more description were the main characters, which I feel spoiled a bit of the book. If you have a group of characters but only bother to describe a few in detail, you can tell right off the bat that the other ones aren’t worth remembering or learning too much about. I enjoyed the two different timelines, and liked bouncing back and forth between them. It did get a bit repetitive since the same things seemed to be happening in each timeline and it sometimes felt like I was reading a scenario twice. I read this mostly at night and enjoyed the atmosphere and creepy bits! The story seemed to go a bit downhill towards the end. The ending was predictable and didn’t really have a conclusion, which I didn’t like. Overall, it was a fast read that was enjoyable, but had a few flaws.

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A promising gothic premise with excellent buildup that unfortunately drags on endlessly without any real action and fails to deliver.

The Dark Between The Trees had all the elements for a good Halloween read: an eerie folklore about a demonic creature, an out-of-bounds forest, dual timelines set about three hundred years apart told through multiple perspectives, lots of telltales, and an incredible atmosphere, but even with this great package, it failed to make any impact.

Seventeen soldiers enter the Moresby forest in 1643 despite being warned by some from their own company, of the infamous cursed woods and the monster that inhabits it. Only two survivors make it back and their accounts of shifting landscapes and a stalking monster don’t make much sense. Fast forward to today, a group of five women are all set to explore the same route the soldiers took and figure out the cause behind their disappearance.

The best part about this book is the atmosphere. The shifting landscapes are well explained, and even though it’s a bizarre concept, Barnett makes it believable. The ‘woods within the woods’ concept could initially throw you off, but as you delve further, you’d begin to understand the graphics. Although never confirmed, it points out intersecting dimensions and entities that roam freely through them, or let’s just say that’s how I interpreted it. Through the multitude of PoVs, the buildup of tension is slow but steady and quite natural.

Now onto the things I disliked: the endless dragging on of the invisible monstrosity. People keep getting killed but not once, anyone sees anything. There’s so much buildup that you’d expect a huge reveal at the end, or at least a face-off, but there is absolutely nothing. Whether it’s the soldiers or the women's squad, everyone is walking in loops, seeing the same things again and again, and still trying to sound excited. The repetition is frustrating. The book ended on, I don’t even know what to call it, a bizarre suspended idea - you know, basically left hanging without any explanation. No questions answered, no cliffhanger, just a bland unresolved climax!

Overall, excellent atmosphere, and eerie vibes, but the redundancy and loose ends make it an unsatisfying read.

Thanks to Rebellion, Solaris and NetGalley for the ARC in exchange for my honest review.
Publication Date: October 11th, 2022.

3.25/5🌟 (rounded down).

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An expedition of 5 women head into Moresby Wood, hoping to discover the fate of a group of soldiers who vanished 350 years earlier. 2 men abandoned their group early on and survived, talling a tale of an unseen, stealthy creature within the woods and changing terrain and landmarks.

This is a dual timeline story, with the chapters alternating between the past and present stories and multiple points of view. The characters in both storylines quickly began to succumb to the panic and paranoia of being lost as their numbers began to dwindle. Time, location and reality took on a sense of fluidity and deception. The forest gained an ominous and claustrophobic feel as rain and a disorienting mist set in. I found the setting and atmosphere of this story to be both immersive and ominous, with touches of almost alien otherness.

A few things didn't work well for me. The alternating storylines did serve to keep me turning the pages, but the story structure also felt somewhat awkward and confusing. I found the present day story more intriguing, so it was often frustrating that just as the story gained some momentum the chapter would end and we'd move to the other storyline.

Overall, this was an atmospheric folk horror tale with some genuinely creepy moments, a terrifying unseen enemy, and a alowly building sense of dread and hopelessness. I didn't find the story as engrossing as I'd hoped I would; however, I still enjoyed my time spent in Moresby Forest. Fans of slower paced, nature based horror stories will find plenty to like here.

Thank you to both Netgalley and Rebellion for providing a copy for me to read and review.

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I don't often read horror, so was looking forward to this, as it seemed more 'folk horror' than 'blood and guts' horror. The premise of the story sounded great, but I had no idea as to what would even happen......

I liked the female group - I could relate to each of them in turn - their moods, their personalities, their flaws. If you've ever worked in an office, you'll have met someone like each of these women. Same goes for the group of soldiers - a band of brothers with a common cause, to get out of the forest, albeit in very different ways (although the choice had been taken form them).

I was a little disappointed that the 'beast' that was following them wasn't elaborated on more, but it certainly was sinister.

I found the ending a little too abrupt, but then again, it left a few things to the readers imagination. I think I do need to read it again.

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I just could not get into this book at all! It did not grip me, I did not feel the atmosphere - just dual timelines with dialogue.

I do not know what exactly I was expecting from this book, but nevertheless, it did not deliver.

While reading the book, I felt like I did not care about the characters, the timelines, or the happenings... I just don't know, it just did not gel with me at all.

Thanks, NetGalley, for the ARC!

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The Dark Between the Trees had all the elements of a good isolation/fear of the woods horror story. Although the characters weren’t completely alone, the dread that I felt made it feel like they were alone and I was alone too.

The story is told from multiple points of view and follows two groups of people from different time periods. A group of academics, from the present explore a forest that has been under the umbrella of haunted and possessed for hundreds of years. The second is a group of military men from the past who were attacked by a mysterious enemy. The story switches between the two time periods and the two groups.

Great story, well fleshed out characters.

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I am not always a huge fan of multiple time lines, and this book is not exception unfortunately. I kept getting confused about who was who and what was going on which was taking away from my overall enjoyment. However, it was a decent book and do suggest checking it out!

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The Dark between the Trees simultaneously tells two stories. The first centres around Dr Alice Christopher and a group of archaeologists who enter a wood in an unspecified area in the north of England called Moresby Wood. The purpose of the expedition is to find out what happened to a group of Parliamentarian soldiers that went missing at the beginning of the English Civil War, who according to local legend mysteriously disappeared in Moresby Wood.

The second story is the story of the soldiers who went missing and what actually happened to them. It transpires that after being ambushed close to the wood, they sought refuge in the haunted place that locals tell is full of ghosts, witches and a monstrous evil that has resided there ages before the dawn of man.

I have to say that I was so conflicted about this as I wanted to like this book more than I actually did!

Unfortunately, I have to say that I never really got wholly on board with the book at all!

Don’t get me wrong, there are some really good bits in it. The ending is fantastic, but as I said I just couldn’t gel with the rest of the book.

I think one of the reasons was that due to there being two narratives, I never really clicked with the characters. At times. I was lost with who was who. Particularly with the story of the Roundhead soldiers who ultimately become lost in the wood.

However, similarly I didn’t really gel with the group of scientists whose experiences mirror those of the soldiers.

When I originally requested this, I expected that it would be chock full of atmosphere and foreboding, but somehow, I just didn’t get that overarching sense and at times I was hoping that the end would come in order to tell me what the actual hell was going on. And also similarly with the story of the characters in the soldiers aspect, I never really connected with the party of women who become lost too.

Like I said. I really wanted to like this and was disappointed when I didn’t get along with it as well as I thought I would. There is no doubt about it that Fiona Barnett is a good writer and that she will be a name to watch. I liked her characterisations, but I thought with the story split into two they unfortunately did not develop enough to make me care.

Her ability to build tension throughout the narrative is good too. Especially when both parties ultimately end up disintegrating and the conflict that ensues between the two parties is really good to watch (read), but ultimately, it did not strike that chord with me that made me want to care.

Similarly with her particular brand of horror. One of the things that drew me to the book is that I find stories set in this particular time in history to be really creepy. I think it may be due to the fact that I grew up on British horror films, and some of my favourites are from Tigon pictures. Films like Blood on Satan’s Claw, or Witchfinder General. And more recently The Vvitch, even Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter and Arthur Millar’s The Crucible all strike that same level of unease. I don’t know, for me it just oozes atmosphere. I think it is the juxtaposition of being just on the cusp of modernity, and those old folkloric ideologies that just strike that sense of fear.

And Fiona Barnett does manage manage to evoke that sense of fear and the claustrophobia of the setting. However, I just didn’t get that sustained sense of that particular atmosphere, and at times I lost it a bit, which was a shame.

All in all, this is my experience with the book. I am not dissing it, but telling you that I didn’t get along with it. There are far more people who did and loved it. Unfortunately, I wasn’t one of them.

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In horror novels nothing good ever comes of going into the woods and Fiona Barnett’s The Dark Between the Trees striking debut just goes to show that nothing ever changes. At first glance and after reading the blurb you may very well stick your nose up at this novel as the plot sounds derivative of many other ‘creature in the woods’ plotlines, however, it puts a very clever and ultimately fresh spin on an old trope. Even if the pace is slow (probably too slow for some), it is deliberately so and I found myself sucked into the uneasiness and surreal nature of the unfolding split narratives.

The blurb sells The Dark Between the Trees as a “surrealist gothic folk-thriller for fans of The Ritual and The Descent (I’m thinking of the film, rather than the magnificent Jeff Long novel). Blurbs often overegg novels but this is relatively accurate, it has some of the latter in that like The Descent one of the two story strands features only women and like The Ritual the group get lost in a forest and are stalked by a creature. Beyond that the comparisons are rather superficial and it is the differences which make The Dark Between the Trees an impressive novel, this is significantly more than a creature in the woods novel and in many ways the creature becomes side-lined as events get progressively stranger.

In The Ritual we wait and wait for the creature to finally appear, however, this is nothing compared to The Dark Between the Trees, but this never becomes problematic as the interaction between the characters is much too good to hinder the story. So, if you are after a slasher/creature in the woods kind of read, then look elsewhere, this is much more thoughtful and is heading away from genre into literary fiction territory. Considering the majority of the novel is set in a forest, another interesting deviation from The Ritual, was the fact that Fiona Barnett did not dwell on overlong or detailed descriptions of the locality, but still managed to develop both atmosphere and a strange sense of otherworldliness and isolation.

The dual narratives set in 1643 and the present day was a real strength of the novel and I loved the way in which they in some respects mirrored each other, deviated in other places, with their very different personal circumstances unable to change fate. The soldiers of 1643 were all God-fearing men, which led to their own clashes, whilst the women in the present-day narrative believed in science, archaeology and logic, but found themselves at odds in having to accept the impossible. By way of a taster, on their first night they camp in a clearing with a huge tree, but in the morning the tree is gone. How do they explain this rationally or irrationally for that matter? How could they return to their university funding boards and reveal this astonishing fact? The arguments, conversations and sheer incredulity of five very intelligent women made riveting reading and was in stark contrast to the soldiers of 1643 who were much more open to accepting the supernatural.

Even though Fiona Barnett chooses to avoid heavy descriptions of Moresby Wood this not make this Northern England location any the less intriguing and I was quickly reaching for Google to see if such a place existed, but I will let you check yourself should you wish to find out more. Straight from the outset the forest, which was fenced off with barbed wire, radiated a dangerous vibe which clashed with the jovial mood of the five women who were attempting to follow in the footsteps of the group of soldiers (told in the other narrative) who disappeared in 1643. I quickly found myself tuned into both time periods and as the technology strangely failed in the modern narrative the women were quickly more vulnerable than their 1643 counterparts, who at least were armed and seasoned fighting men.

Dr Alice Christopher, an historian who has devoted her entire academic career to uncovering the secrets of Moresby Wood leads the party. Through her we realise that the area is deep with folktales and myths which the book cleverly explores, some of which predate the ill-fated 1643 expedition into the forest. Armed with metal detectors, GPS units, mobile phones and the most recent map of the area (which is nearly 50 years old), her group enters the wood ready for anything, but soon find themselves quickly out of their depth and clashing about what to do next and they begin to dream of the nice cosy library they left behind. These are not adventurer Indiana Jones types, with the narrative concentrating on a couple of the women.

By contract the 1643 group is significantly bigger and so there is more opportunity for death, savagery and the creature making a slightly more visible appearance. Veterans of the English Civil War, many of which had not seen their families for a long time, they were a sympathetic bunch with the plot following a slightly more traditional horror story arc. The manner in which the stories converged was wild stuff, even if not all questions were answered, it was creative and entertaining stuff.

The Dark Between the Trees has a lot to offer and the title gives a minor clue in what to expect, with ‘between’ the key word. Whilst the characters have their own motives, and there are many of them, the narratives were impressively distinct and once the reader realises this is much more than a monster novel it gets more enjoyable. The sense of hopelessness and dread is skilfully heightened as we realise maps and technology are useless in the vividly drawn Moresby Wood.

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I had high hopes for this book, but it failed to meet my expectations on several levels. My first issue was that I had trouble keeping any of the characters straight in the older storyline. There were too many names right off the bat and everyone blended together. The characters in the present timeline were more fleshed out, but still hard to connect with. My main issue though was the sluggish pace. While the descriptions of the setting and atmosphere of isolation and foreboding were well written, it took forever for anything interesting to happen. I almost gave up on it multiple times, and while things did start to pick up in the last third, the abrupt ending and lack of resolution was disappointing. I could see this story working well as a movie, but as a book, it was lacking.

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Thank you so much to Rebellion Publishing and NetGalley for providing me with an e-ARC; it is greatly appreciated.

I am always down for any horror that takes place in the woods, and for a majority of the story this book delivered. I truly thought I was going to give this 4 stars...and then the ending happened. There was such an amazing buildup of tension, questions, and madness, just for all of that to take a nosedive at the end. None of the things I was looking forward to discovering were answered. Nothing that I was interested in mattered.

Be aware going into this that it's a slow moving story. This is written in a dual timeline with alternating chapters. Both groups of people experience the same things, which attributes to the slow feeling, and for some might seem quite repetitive. However, the story really hooked me in, and I needed to know what was going on. (Although that doesn't really get answered in the end)

One thing I ended up having an issue with was telling the women apart. They are only a group of five, but I could only ever differentiate Nuria and Alice. Kim, Sue, and Helly just ended up seeming like the same character to me. I didn't have this issue with the group of soldiers, and there were a lot more of them in their group. I don't believe I've encountered this before, and I am not sure why.

The writing is ok here. I found several words being repeated quite a bit. Not enough to be distracting, but enough for me to notice it. We spend a lot of time in the character's heads, and I think the author did a good job at showing the buildup of fear among the groups, which is one of my favorite aspects of the story. Their fear is quite tangible.

Overall I enjoyed the ride, but the destination was far too abrupt for me. I'm curious though to see what this author writes next.

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"Which came first, the dismal wildness of an inaccessible place or the ghost stories? Surely, in this place, they were too intertwined to tell."

After finally getting the funding she needed, Dr. Alice Christopher gathers a team of four other women for an expedition into the infamous Moresby Forest. A forest with a history of mysterious occurrences. Armored with the latest gear and equipment, the five women venture into the depths of the unknown, ready to unearth the secrets that lay hidden. But soon the women discover that all is not what it seems and the forest is teaming with more than just the flora of the region.

"Nuria generally found that she preferred nature from a distance, and preferably from the inside of a warm library." Me too, after reading this book.

As soon as I got approved for this ARC I was on it, the premis for this one is everything I love in a horror book, and it started really good! The Dark Between the Trees is a slow and creepy read, with elements of horror and magical realism mixed with history and folk lore. The story is told with two timelines — 300 years in the past and then present day. I had a hard time following with the timeline changing between every chapter but I found the modern day chapters a lot more interesting. I just could'nt connect with the soldiers and basically the same thing happens to both of the parties as they advance through the forest. The book was atmospheric and creepy and during the read I kept trying to figure out if it was a witch, ghost, curse, monster or even aliens. The end reveal didnt really clear anything up, I still dont know what happened? I will say though, Fiona Barnett really managed to capture the feeling of being lost and stalked in the rainy, cold, misty woods, without any means of contacting the modern world and however much youre trying, you just keep getting deeper and deeper into the dark woods...

Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for giving me the opportunity to read this ARC! This review will be posted on Storygraph, GoodReads, Amazon and Instagram.

TW: death, blood, injury detail, animal death, vomit, religious bigotry

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THE DARK BETWEEN THE TREES is a dual timeline tale about a creepy wood where you are irrevocably lost and something moves too fast to see.

The monster in the dark is so creepy, picking off the various characters without ever being seen, just its effects. Slashed open corpses. Missing people. It stalks and follows, an uneasy prickling at the back of your neck, without once being seen. The dark oppressive woods work so well with this premise, the ever undulating woodland that seems to shift and thwart all technological attempts to map it.

The book follows both the Parliamentarians as they head through the wood and the modern day research team. In many ways, they echo each other. The researchers are deliberately trying to follow the Parliamentarians' footsteps, but the wood takes them in a similar way, crippling them physically and emotionally. It leads to a deliciously creepy mystery about what happened in two different past time lines as an even earlier story is woven in in two different retellings.

The book also looks at academic obsession, the driving need to find out, to prove something you've pursued for years. It was very interesting to see that side of it. While it's not dark academia, due to setting and the fact that's only from the modern side of the book, I liked that angle. The historical side is more about superstition and survival, which balances Alice's obsessive search for what happened, her fixation on the area.

While there are some injuries, this is not a gory horror. Instead the creepiness and spine-tingling nopes come from the atmosphere and intense feeling of being corralled towards something of an unnatural design. It's the prefect read for darkening days and lengthening nights - though maybe read it after you go on a woodland hike...

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A glorious mash-up of genres, but still strongly situated in horror, The Dark Between The Trees taps into our most primal fears about being lost in the woods.

I guess the most important thing about a horror book is this: was it scary? It was scary enough. I wasn’t terrified out of my mind, but it’s very creepy and reading it at night definitely puts the heebie-jeebies into you.

The book is slow-burn, which I thought was great. I loved the mystery and the dual timelines - we get equal time with both the 1600s soldiers and the early-2000s historians. In fact, the timelines were one of the most interesting things about the novel, because they gave it a real historical fiction feel, and the way the stories ran parallel to one another, or rather spiralled into one another, was part of the fun. And my favourite horror stories are the ones that are set in the past.

The pacing is well-balanced in that while there are stretches of people just wandering in the woods, neither are these stretches too long that we grow bored, nor are they so short it feels like the group is not in danger.

A lot of the creepiness of the novel is based on not knowing what is going on or who or what is hunting them. The legends around the woods they are trapped in add to this, especially as the stories are often contradictory or unresolved.

The characters worked for me. I think in basic horror it’s sometimes best not to have very deep or fleshed-out characters because then you care about them too much. All I want are people with motivations that make sense and aren’t complete jerks. This book provides that - we do have jerk characters, but they are not the POV characters, and the others were distinguishable. There wasn’t a character I particularly cared about, but I was less interested in the people than what was going on in the woods.

The ending people might be torn about, but I like an ambiguous conclusion in horror. Sometimes too much explanation worries away at the scariness of it, like when you see a haunted house with the lights on. There’s also something fun about it being a mystery for centuries that still is not resolved, that, in ten, twenty years, perhaps another group will enter the woods. What will happen to them?

Overall, The Dark Between the Trees is a ponderous, atmospheric story in the vein of movies like Blair Witch, The Witch, and The Ritual, and I recommend it to those who like their horror more menacing than slasher, and with a historical fiction focus.

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The wood was a liar, but beneath that was buried something true, and fascinating, and the wood was telling her what it was, if only she could tune into it properly, or decipher it. [loc. 829]
In 1643 a small company of Parliamentarian soldiers is ambushed on a hillside somewhere in Northern England. Their only hope is to seek shelter in nearby Moresby Forest. Never mind that the locals tell stories about terrible secrets among the trees...

In 21st-century England, five women pass through the boundary fence and into Moresby Forest. Dr Alice Christopher, historian, has devoted her career to the lost soldiers. Why did seventeen men enter the wood, and only two emerge? Dr Christopher is accompanied by Nuria, a PhD student; Sue, from the Ordnance Survey, who haven't published a map of the wood for fifty years; and Kim and Helly, representatives of the National Parks authority. The women have GPS, and phones, and metal detectors: and it's not a very large wood ...

This was slow and spooky. I was inescapably reminded of The Blair Witch Project, though for reasons of ambience and forestry rather than anything more specific. The narrative cuts between the women and the soldiers, which heightens the suspense. It quickly becomes clear that there is something unnatural about Moresby Forest, and the two parties each recount tales of witches, of a medieval charcoal-burner whose family might have died of plague, and of a fearsome beast known as the Corrigal. Around them, trees appear and disappear. Gradually, each party – the all-female expedition and the all-male military company – diminishes …

Some interesting themes here: the different ways in which leadership works in the two companies are especially well-drawn, with Alice’s obsessive curiosity in strong contrast to Captain Davies’ sense of duty to his men. The women are dismayed by the failure of their technology: the men turn to prayer, which is as good an option as any.

There are evocative descriptions of the forest in both narrative threads, but – perhaps because of the aforementioned oddities of that forest – there is very little sense of season. Anyone who’s walked in a forest knows it’s a very different place in spring than in autumn: but the forest that the characters are walking through is timeless, reminiscent of Holdstock’s Mythago Wood, and seems to manifest its own microclimate. I didn’t get much sense of the characters’ physical appearances, either, or of their lives outside the forest: even Alice, perhaps the most detailed of the characters, was described more in terms of academic grudges than everyday life. I think that sense of isolation was part of the story, but it made the characters less engaging. And I didn't find the (fairly abrupt) conclusion wholly satisfying, but it was logical.

Thanks to Netgalley for the free ARC in exchange for this honest review. UK publication date is 13th October 2022.

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"An unforgettable, surrealist gothic folk-thriller with commercial crossover appeal from a brilliant new voice.

1643: A small group of Parliamentarian soldiers are ambushed in an isolated part of Northern England. Their only hope for survival is to flee into the nearby Moresby Wood...unwise though that may seem. For Moresby Wood is known to be an unnatural place, the realm of witchcraft and shadows, where the devil is said to go walking by moonlight...

Seventeen men enter the wood. Only two are ever seen again, and the stories they tell of what happened make no sense. Stories of shifting landscapes, of trees that appear and disappear at will...and of something else. Something dark. Something hungry.

Today, five women are headed into Moresby Wood to discover, once and for all, what happened to that unfortunate group of soldiers. Led by Dr Alice Christopher, an historian who has devoted her entire academic career to uncovering the secrets of Moresby Wood. Armed with metal detectors, GPS units, mobile phones and the most recent map of the area (which is nearly 50 years old), Dr Christopher's group enters the wood ready for anything.

Or so they think."

Folkloric Annihilation.

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The Dark Between the Trees is haunting, gripping and a genuinely quite spooky read. Set in Moresby Forest, it focuses in part on a group of lost Royalist soldiers during the English civil war who are being stalked by an unknown creature. The other narrative is of a group of present day historians who make their way into the forest to figure out what happened.

Whilst dual timelines can often cause readers a good deal of frustration as one timeline is inevitably more interesting than the other, this is not the case with this book. The characters in both time frames are equally as interesting, the plot just as mysterious and the pacing is excellent for both. Barnett skillfully allows the two plots to feed into each other so that mysteries in the other section are revealed, which compelled me to keep going.

One of my favourite aspects of this book were the motivations of the characters. Whilst not all of the characters were particularly likable, I appreciated their internal monologues and felt like I truly understood them as characters. They felt very fleshed out rather than feeling one dimensional.

The only downside of this book for me would be the final chapter, as the ending was not particularly satisfying, and left me feeling a little bit empty. This is a shame because the rest of the book (including the chapters leading up to the very end) was very strong and had incredibly satisfying moments.

Thank you to Netgalley and Rebellion for the ARC.

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