 We all go to our ruin. We are all the same in this. Welcome to Church of the Chair where I have somehow collected a bunch of books by an author I have never read before. I'm your host E, and today Laird Hunt is getting dark with his fairy tales. Yeah, so at some point in time I collected Zory, Never Home, and The Evening Road by this author. Today we are talking about In the House in the Dark of the Woods by Laird Hunt. I never read this author before. I picked up two of these books off of Book Outlet, the one that I'm talking about today, and Zory over here. The other two I got from a library sale, I believe they cost me about a quarter a piece. And I decided to pick this one up because I wanted something short, dark, and literary, and this seemed like the perfect deal. It is only 210 pages, something like that, 214 pages, and it blows by very, very quickly, and it is the perfect length because in my humble opinion this book makes absolutely no sense. Writing is for work and God, Eliza. Writing is for many things, goodie. That is not to say that this book is a bad book. What I consider this book to be is literally the journey, the experience, what the character goes through during this weird, wacky, mind-boggling journey into a dark woods. The main character really has, isn't named throughout the book, and I'm still by the end of the book wondering if any of the names that she was called was actually her name. She's called a pet name Goody. She is also called Eliza, but there are other characters named Eliza. There's a character named Captain Jane. There's a little girl whose name slips to my mind. And I honestly can't tell if this is a metaphor or an allegory for all of these characters being the main character, but I somehow doubt it. What I do know is I had an absolutely wild time with this book because it is so dark and grim. Basically, if you think of Grimm's fairy tales from an adult perspective, from a horror perspective, but this is definitely literary fiction. It is written in the same voice as its historical time frame. It's New England, I believe. I could be completely wrong about this. It is Colonial New England. It says, set against the eerie, dangerous world of bygone New England. In the house, in the dark of the woods, is a historical counter unlike any you've read and a novel you'll soon, not soon forget. I agree with all of that. I finished reading this almost a week ago, and I think about it quite often, especially some of the surrealistic aspects of it. I've been trying to piece together what the ending could mean, or nearly everything after the halfway point. There's a flying ship at one point. It all gets very odd, and it's very much a fairy tale in league with things like, I guess I would say Peter Pan-ish, because it is about someone going to a weird place and ending up in a flying ship, so that's a very loose comparison. But it's definitely a fairy tale, and there are some horror scenes, some very unsettling, subtle horror going on in this book. Like scenes, think of It by Stephen King, where Pennywise is the mummy, and Ben is looking off the bridge, looking down at that. Just that image, that static image of something standing there that shouldn't be standing there. There's a lot of stuff like that in this book. There are some illusions I think I caught with the character's mental health, what she was going through. But I would highly recommend if you liked movies like The Witch with the two Vs, The Vitch, whatever you want to call it. If you liked that movie, you were absolutely going to love this book. I see something. Can you see it? Lean close. Something stirs. My favorite part of this book is the mounting, increasing sense of dread. From the very first couple of chapters all the way to the end, there is this confusion in your mind, or at least in my mind about what is going on and what is going to happen next. There is a scene involving a well, and going down into the well, that the tension was off the charts for me. This isn't a thriller with thriller writing, but at the same time I was on the edge of my seat, waiting for what was about to happen, because nothing had happened like I thought it would up until that point. There are many scenes like that in this book, just one right after another, where you're questioning whether or not what you are seeing is real, what you are hearing is real, what you are feeling is real, and then you have very well described over the top sequences, like I said, like with the flying boat. I never knew exactly who was who, because like I said, several characters share the same name in this. And I wasn't sure once again if it was allegory or metaphor for all of these characters being the same character. Very well could be, so if you caught that also, if you've read this and you caught that, I would love to hear from you. But I was astonished with how unique this book is and how it is not written down in any way. It is very, I don't want to call it literate, but it's very literary and I think it captures the essence of the timeframe absolutely perfectly. What some might consider run on sentences, I would look more at like a Cormac McCarthy style of writing. Don't worry, there are quotation marks for what little dialogue there is in this book. But I would say if you look toward a comparison for what the writing style is like, it's definitely Cormac McCarthy adjacent. The plot is very straight forward, it's about a woman getting lost in the woods and experiencing some wild batshit crazy stuff out in the woods, like witches, strange men running from things. It's very surreal, like I've already said, but if you're into that kind of thing, I would highly suggest you check out this book, but I wouldn't read it if you're expecting answers. The same thing would go for like Jack Jemps, the grip of it. I got the same feeling from that book as I got from this book and I believe the confusion is on purpose. It's not supposed to be explained. There might be themes and things like that, but certain things are just left to be their creepy selves. And I absolutely love it about it. It doesn't overstay its welcome. It's only 214 pages. So if you want to give it a shot, please do. There's a link down there in the doobly-doo you can buy from that. It's an affiliate link. I get a couple pennies and you get the book. But that's all the time I have for you today. Have you read this book? What did you think about it down there? Let me know down there in the comments, whether you liked it, whether you hated it, whether you felt mad about it. But until next time, I'll hail the chair.