In a Dark Wood
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- $6.99
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- $6.99
Publisher Description
Thirty-nine, recently divorced, jobless, Benedick Hunter is an actor heading in the exact opposite direction of happily ever after: everything from spending time with his own children to the prospect of dating brings him down. So when he comes across a children's book his mother Laura wrote, he decides that her life and work--haunting stories replete with sinister woods and wicked witches and brave girls who battle giants--hold the key to figuring out why his own life is such a mess.
Setting out to find out why Laura killed herself when he was six, Benedick travels from his native England to the U.S. in search of her friends and his own long-lost relatives. As he grows obsessed with Laura's books and their veiled references to reality Benedick enters into a dark wood–a dark wood that is both hilariously real and terrifyingly psychological. It is then that his story becomes an exploration not only of his mother's genius but also of the nature of depression, and of the healing power of storytelling in our lives.
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.
