In a Dark Wood
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4.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Thirty-nine, divorced, jobless: Benedick Hunter is going nowhere, heading in the exact opposite direction he expected. So when he comes across a children's book that his mother, Laura, wrote, he decides that her life and work - haunting stories replete with sinister woods, wicked witches and brave girls who battle giants - hold the key to finding out why his own life is such a mess.
Setting out to discover why Laura killed herself when he was six, Benedick travels to the US. As he grows more obsessed with what happened to his mother, Benedick enters into a dark wood - one that is both hilariously real and terrifyingly psychological. Dark humorous and inventive, In a Dark Wood casts light on the nature of depression, genius and of the healing power of storytelling.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Once upon a time, a 39-year-old unemployed actor, embroiled in a divorce from his cheating wife, drifting further from his two kids and falling deeper into depression, began unraveling the mystery of his mother, Laura, who committed suicide when he was only six. Thus Craig (A Vicious Circle) begins this dreamy, spellbinding novel, her first to be published in the U.S. Downtrodden Benedick Hunter yearns to find out why his mother, a successful writer and illustrator of children's fairy tales, killed herself. He becomes obsessed with her dark fables (think Sendak or Gorey), which always take place in the depths of the woods, "the deepest, darkest manifestations of the subconscious you could hope to find." Benedick delves into his own subconscious as he struggles to understand why he can hardly keep himself together. His longing to interview Laura's former friends and colleagues takes him from London to America, where he receives only conflicting accounts of the mad genius. To learn the truth, no matter how frightening, Benedick must find his long-lost relatives (who also live at the edge of a dark wood). With a sure hand, Craig brings chilling suspense and dark humor to a stylized study of the loss of childhood innocence, the complexities of creativity and the correlation between artistic genius and mental health all expertly cloaked in the symbols and metaphors of fairy tales.
