C. G. Drews’s Don’t Let the Forest In sets out as a mystery novel. But it cracks all its enigmas in the first few chapters to pave the way for a more ghastly tale. When inveterate storyteller Andrew Perrault returns to Wickwood Academy after summer’s end, his best friend Thomas Rye shows up with blood on his sleeve. “The first question on Andrew’s mind was Whose blood was that?” (p. 11).
Andrew knows Thomas and his parents have a strained relationship: They’re famous artists who make hundreds of thousands of dollars per piece, but who can’t save a penny and frequently abuse their son. The answer to Andrew’s question seems obvious, then, until the principal summons Thomas to her office and Andrew snoops on their conversation, where a detective reveals that Thomas’s parents are missing.
“This is following up on a concerning 911 call. Neighbors reported hearing loud noises coming from your home last night, Mr. Rye. Screams.”
[…] “Nobody was home this morning,” the detective went on. “House was trashed. Looks like an animal tore through. And there’s … blood. Due to the volume of blood, we surmise it’s not yours.” (p. 21)
Despite the principal’s efforts to keep Thomas’s missing parents out of the halls, gossip spreads: Thomas Rye, tortured artist with paint on his clothes, is the cold-blooded killer of his parents. Andrew doesn’t believe the rumors … until Thomas lies about the circumstances of his parents’ disappearance. Thomas insists he had a “[r]egular family argument,” then he left for school (p. 62). Andrew reacts to this evasive answer by offering no condemnation, instead declaring, to Thomas’s horror: “‘I don’t care, you know … If you did” (p. 63). His implication that Thomas could be a murderer drives a wedge between them. Thomas sneaks out to the forest without Andrew, potentially to meet Andrew’s sister, Dove. “Every night, Andrew woke alone to silence, Thomas’s empty blankets tangled up and their window open … He slumped in class with dirt still smudged along his jaw and dark circles under his eyes. When Andrew noticed Dove looked the same, forest dirt clinging to her shoes as she stifled yawns while they studied—he understood” (p. 70).
The rupture in their friendship comes to a head when Andrew follows him into the forest one night. He expects to find Thomas and Dove, “mouths against skin and shirts slipping from shoulders and the leafy green knobs of the forest’s fingers tangled in their hair” (p. 89). Instead, he encounters a beast with clawed hands, rotting skin hanging from arms of exposed bone, and a face spilling vines. Jana Heidersdorf’s illustrations are a gruesome touch that pop these horrors straight off the page. After a brief chase, the monster corners Andrew, only for Thomas to ram it.
He hasn’t been sneaking off to kiss Andrew’s sister, he’s been fighting these horrors every night. Alone. In the chapter that follows, once they return to their dorm, Thomas explains: “They grow out of the forest every night … if I don’t kill them all, they’ll go after anyone I hang around” (p. 100). It dawns on Andrew that a monster killed Thomas’s parents. Worse, Thomas finds one of his drawings, inspired by one of the macabre tales Andrew enjoys inventing:
The seventh son staring into a wishing well, while a monster with a torn-off wolf’s head are his parents in the background. Thomas’s voice stretched with anguish. “That’s what it looked like. The monster in my house. Just like this, down to the stitching at its throat. And this … hooves, and corpse skin, and vines exploding from its mouth and ears and eyes.” (p. 101)
Thomas’s drawings are coming to life, and they’re intent on killing anyone close to him. Now, the tale casts all illusions of mystery aside. Thomas murdered his parents, but only by proxy.
”That day before school started? The fight the neighbors heard? It was a monster. I hid. I listened to my parents fight it, but they’re always high these days, and I didn’t think it was real. How could it be goddamn real? I took a knife from the kitchen, but then I saw what it looked like and I ran. I just ran.” (p. 100)
The boys spend the rest of the novel fighting monsters in the forest at night, but the monsters also begin attacking in the day. For instance, in the middle of Andrew and Thomas having a picnic in Wickwood’s garden, the so-called Antler King appears. The Antler King chases them through the school, and after Andrew and Thomas separate, the King chases Andrew down. It comes to a head when Andrew, thinking he has escaped, bumps into their teacher, Mr. Clemens, who dies at the Antler King’s hands. The King drives an antler dagger between Clemens’s eyes, skins his face, and leaves him on the floor for carnivorous vines to devour (p. 167). But the heart of this novel isn’t fighting monsters, it’s the boys who fight those monsters. The reason Andrew was so intent on finding Dove and Thomas in the forest is because he’s in love with Thomas.
The story is flooded with confession upon confession to the reader of Andrew’s undying love for Thomas. In fact, Andrew tells us on the first page:
It hadn’t hurt, the day he had cut out his own heart. Andrew had written about it later in spidery lines from a sharp pen—a story about a boy who took a knife to his chest and carved himself open … no one would want a heart like this. But he’d still cut it out and given it away … It didn’t matter if Thomas read the truth in the story or not, how he alone owned Andrew’s heart. The thrill of the confession had been terrible and beautiful—and retractable. Just in case. (p. 1)
What seems to be a horror book with a romantic subplot is a romance set in a horror.
The novel’s will-they-won’t-they moments are wrapped in things as extraordinary as lying about parental death and sharing a bed after fighting monsters, or as simple as a misunderstanding about sexual orientation. In one instance, Thomas pours his heart out to Andrew: “Can’t you tell that I’m in … that I like you? Because I-I like you a lot, okay?” … “Everything inside me is in ruins … For you” (p. 225). Andrew responds:
“I’m asexual … I don’t have crushes,” Andrew said. “I don’t want—I don’t think about … about sleeping with people. I don’t want it. With anyone … Sometimes it’s different for other asexual people. But for me it’s … this.” (p. 226)
But what Thomas hears is: “You don’t like boys” (p. 226). Andrew, who has been in love with Thomas for years, denies this, but insists he can’t be what Thomas needs, especially with carnal forms of intimacy. “He wanted to say, You are my everything, too. He wanted to say, I don’t exist without you. He wanted to say, Kiss me. But he had to step back, because he couldn’t be what Thomas wanted, and for that he was going to lose him completely” (p.227). Thomas mistakes Andrew’s asexuality for anxiety, and their conversation crumbles into ad hominem attacks from there. I think Drews captures life through the eyes of a person on the asexual spectrum living in an allosexual world spectacularly. Though an asexual knows they are different, they don’t feel personally inadequate, rather incompatible, and often the reaction from allosexuals is scorn or misunderstanding.
The book is full of meditations on the asexuality umbrella. From discourses on sex repulsion to affirmations of asexuality as an identity distinct from being “nervous” or “broken.” The book itself argues this by affirming Andrew and Thomas’s relationship in its last few chapters. The boys learn they have to make a sacrifice to prevent the forest from destroying all of Wickwood. They do everything in their power to stay together without having to sacrifice one another in order to lull the monsters in the forest asleep. But Andrew ultimately insists they sacrifice his heart. Thomas, though, has another idea. The book’s ending is ambiguous, given we can’t be sure how much of this is true or fake, as the forest plays games, particularly with Andrew: conjuring creatures who may be hallucinations, manifesting Dove throughout the year, even though, as we learn near the end of the novel, she died the previous year in the forest. Readers are left puzzled on the veracity of all the narrative’s events, something in which the author takes pride in the Acknowledgements section.
But the closing image is both beautiful and macabre. Andrew buries his notebook, “his heart made paper,” in the forest, its last story inscribed in blood (p. 326). And with this act, the vines that had been growing in Andrew seemingly die, their rose petals flaking and thorns turned brittle. Andrew asks Thomas if this is real, and Thomas replies “kiss me … Then you’ll find out” (p. 327).
What sets this horror novel apart is its interrogation of relationships woven into the narrative and its validation of romance featuring an asexual lead. At the heart of this interrogation is a complicated relationship between two boys—Andrew and Thomas. The novel offers an impressive array of supernatural scares that will please any reader of YA horror, and the book’s short length and quick pacing create a thrilling, page-turning narrative. But readers interested in metaphor, asexual representation, and horror will all find themselves especially pleased with this gem. I look forward to Drews’s next novel.