"This genre-defying, time-switching debut will appeal to fans of thrillers, gothic mysteries, and historic fiction as it follows five women investigating a centuries-old vanishing in menacing Moresby Wood."
Part Blair Witch Project style thriller, part historic page-turner, Fiona Barnett’s The Dark Between the Trees debut also slips into supernatural gothic territory, with witchcraft and devilry also dancing in the tangled trees of Moresby Wood, and through the novel’s twisting plot.
The first scene is set in modern times, as five women set out to investigate why, back in 1643, a band of seventeen ambushed Parliamentarian soldiers took refuge in Moresby Wood, and only two of them survived. Two men who lived to tell terrifying tales of what happened in the wood, and why their peers never returned.
As the women set up camp, plan their investigation, and re-trace the soldiers’ steps, we move back to 1643 and join the men as some of their company die. Then, as the parties from the past and present delve deeper into the darkness, venture further into the unforgiving mists, supernatural threats with folkloric edge emerge from the shadows.
Mixing paranormal menace and peril with real-world physicality and struggles, this is a head-rush horror novel for readers who relish things that go bump in the night.
| Primary Genre | Horror and Supernatural Fiction |
| Other Genres: | |
| Recommendations: |
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...
The Dark Between the Trees features in the following genres: Horror and Supernatural Fiction, Debuts, Thriller and Suspense, Contemporary horror and ghost stories, Fiction, Recommendations
The Dark Between the Trees is available in Paperback, Hardback
The Dark Between the Trees was written by Fiona Barnett and published by Solaris
The Dark Between the Trees has 277 pages
£8.99
