“The God of the Woods” Review: A Thriller that twists like Old Roots

How quickly, I reflected, peril could be followed by beauty in the wilderness, each forming a part of the other.

– From Woodswoman by Anne LaBastille.

Liz Moore’s “The God of the Woods” opens to the languorous, sepia-toned summer of 75’. The novel begins at Camp Emerson, a posh (coined “hoity-toity” by Tracy’s dad) summer camp nestled deep in the Adirondacks, where the temperature is a sticky 75°F and the privilege runs even warmer. Thrown together by circumstance, Tracy and Barbara find themselves cabin mates.

Tracy is an awkward, gawky, quiet 12-year-old girl. More at home reading than the great outdoors, she’s spent her last five summers doing just that. But after her parent’s divorce, her father ships her off to Camp Emerson so he can spend more time with his new girlfriend. Then there’s Barbara. Rebelliously bold, effortlessly divergent. Sauntering onto camp in cutoff jean shorts that barely qualify as clothing, artificially black hair, and eyes rimmed with charcoal, Barbara radiates punk. But what really sets her apart? She’s the only living child of the Van Laars: the same obscenely wealthy family that founded the camp in the first place.

The two misfits form an unlikely friendship. In Tracy’s own words, Barbara was the first friend she’d ever had who seemed to like Tracy as much as Tracy liked her. Sharing secrets and laughs, it’s only when Louise, Barbara’s counselor finds Barbara inexplicably missing from her bunk in the dead of night that this visage of normalcy seems to shatter. 

What follows is a slow-burning, atmospheric thriller that unspools with the precision of a well-told ghost story. It’s revealed that Louise, instead of keeping an eye on the cabin’s inhabitants, was at a clandestine campfire with her secret boyfriend, John Paul McLellan, a godson of the Van Laars. Louise isn’t alone in keeping secrets, however. It soon becomes clear that everyone has some secret to hide, from the tight-lipped Van Laar family to their bleary-eyed guests to the salt-of-the-earth camp directors. Moving from different character’s perspectives, the narrative recurrently shifts from the past to the present, and then back to the past again. When Alice, Barbara’s mother, finds out her daughter has gone missing, she’s forced to confront the shadows of the past. Alice can’t shake the haunting parallel to an earlier tragedy—the vanishing of her first child, an eight-year-old son nicknamed Bear, in 1961. He was never found. 

Both occurred during house parties where the Van Laars hosted friends and business associates. Both happened right there at the Van Laar Preserve. Bear’s disappearance left Alice a specter, a shadow of her former self. Leaving her dependent on sedatives, she became more critic than caregiver, believing that “part of a mother’s duty was to be her daughter’s first, best critic.” Her mothering extended only to chiding Barbara to eat less and to dress better. Now, however, even as everyone insists that Barbara, in typical rebellious fashion, ran away, Alice can’t help but feel the past bleeding into the present. She knows, deep down, that history rarely repeats itself without meaning something.

“The God of the Woods” isn’t simply a story about a missing girl. Moore explores the chafe of parental expectations, the tensions of familial relationships, and class disparity as highlighted by the divide between the Van Laars and the rest of the Preserve. We find ourselves rooting for gawky Tracy to find out what happened to Barbara, hoping for the entitled Van Laars to be brought down to earth, and trying to trace the mystery behind Bear’s disappearance. Paradoxically, the truth seems to elude us even as we get minutely, meticulously close to uncovering it.

Moore tells us that if we find ourselves lost in the forest, not to panic. To panic is to make an enemy of the forest. To stay calm is to be its friend. 

It’s easy to lose yourself amongst the trees. But sometimes, getting lost is the only way to find the truth.