What the Woods Took, by Courtney Gould

[rachelmanija]

A dark fantasy about a group of teenagers who are kidnapped from their homes and forced to participate in wilderness therapy, only to encounter actual monsters in the woods. GREAT premise!

Devin is a lesbian teenager who's been processed through a series of often abusive foster families. After she steals some money from her current foster parents, they have her kidnapped by a wilderness program supposed to straighten her out. She's dragged into the middle of the woods with four other teenagers whose parents have enrolled them because they did drugs, stole money, or were generally rebellious or sad. A pair of guidance counselors lead them on a very long hike through the woods, during which Devin gets in an intense love/hate relationship with one of the other girls. Then their counselors disappear...

For-profit wilderness therapy/survival camp for "troubled teenagers" is a real thing in America, and they really do kidnap teenagers with their parents' permission - and payment. It's abusive and unregulated, and a number of kids have been killed at those camps.

The book begins with an author's note similar to my paragraph above. But once the teenagers are violently kidnapped, their forced hike through the woods proceeds with surprisingly little abuse beyond the fact that they're forced to be there. There's genuine wilderness training and self-esteem-building activities. I don't want to sound like "just" being kidnapped and held against your will isn't abusive by itself, but these programs are typically very abusive in other ways too. I felt like the awfulness of these programs was inexplicably downplayed despite the author apparently writing the book specifically to expose them!

The beginning part, before the counselors vanish, is fine but feels a bit slow. The two boys in particular are not very differentiated, and I kept mixing them up. Surprisingly, the best part of the book is the monsters themselves. What they turn out to be is unexpected and SO COOL, and I wish there was more of it. The book overall is about 70% teenagers interacting, 30% monsters/teenagers vs monsters. That would be fine if I was more into the teenagers, and it wasn't like I wasn't into the teenagers. They're fine. But for me, not more than fine.

Overall I would say this was a perfectly fine book that I didn't love. Except for the part that really focused on the monsters. That, I loved. But that's only about 10% of the whole.

So what are the monsters?

The book is a riff on The Thing/"Who Goes There? The monsters are beings living in the woods that can take the form of any humans they see. They can psychically kill humans by basically body-jumping them, and then have access to their memories and can take the form of anyone in their memories. They can also do this to a lesser extent via telepathy with any human whether they've taken them over or not.

The natural form and transformation sequences of the monsters are fabulously written and super creepy. But what I really loved was when they capture a monster and she talks to them a bit. We learn that the monsters are somehow trapped in the woods and can only escape by taking over a person and stepping into their life. But once they do that, they merge with their personality to some extent; the monster who took over one of the teenagers now feels drawn to help them, because the original girl did. This was fascinating and compelling, and I wish more of the book was about it. Unfortunately, she gets about ten pages of page time in which she's actually open about who and what she is, and then gets killed.