A woman sits in a recliner that was bright blue in another house in another state. Her daughter has just filled two bin bags in a kitchen nothing has been cooked in for years, and she will not let them leave until she has been through both. She feels every corner. She lifts out an empty soup can and runs a finger round the inside of it, in case something worth keeping is stuck to the bottom, and when the tin edge opens her finger she puts it in her mouth without appearing to notice. Only then does she give permission. In the Woods They Wait by Carrie Lee South is a horror novel with a creature in it, and its most upsetting scene is a mother, a daughter and two bags of rubbish.
The House That Time Stopped In
Fifteen years earlier a thirteen-year-old walked into the Ozark National Forest and was not found. His parents were in Arkansas on a birding holiday; they never went home. The father lasted six months and signed away his parental rights on his way out. The mother stayed near the search radius and began to fill a trailer.
South is very good on what the filling is for. The mother keeps a hair on an unwashed shirt because her son exists only in what he touched. She keeps his baby teeth. She papers a wall with cuttings of her own grief-wrecked face, then buries it behind boxes, unable to take it down or look at it. And she has stopped sleeping in a bed, and the reason is the most devastating paragraph in the book: asleep, she could feel what he felt out there, so she stopped closing her eyes. Whatever you know about hoarding disorder going in, this is a portrait of it as an argument with time rather than a mess.
In the Woods They Wait by Carrie Lee South Asks Who Is Actually to Blame
The daughter was not a bystander. At sixteen she took her brother off a marked trail because he had been annoying her, invented a monster that eats children to frighten a boy she knew had nightmares, then ran ahead, wedged herself into a crack in the rock and stayed quiet while he looked for her. She could have stepped out at any second and made it a joke. She did not, and she has never told anyone, the police included.
Fifteen years on she is a ranger in that park when a child vanishes near the campground. That is the engine: a woman who has arranged her whole adult life around one search gets handed another, and she alone knows she is not the rescuer everybody thinks she is.
The People Nobody Believed
The horror in In the Woods They Wait by Carrie Lee South is not really the animal. It is the reception people get when they describe it. The park superintendent lost a colleague to it in 1989, said so plainly to police, and was sent to hospital and treated for a psychotic break. The dead man’s family refused to have him at the funeral. He then talked an entomologist into a year-long study that found nothing, costing her a decade of standing in her field. Two children rescued from that forest forty years apart both described being kept somewhere and fed. Both were filed as delirious.
By the present day he has simply gone quiet, which is where a group should stop and argue. Quiet is not passive. It means padlocks on the caves with a conservation notice on them, unfiled paperwork, and a boy’s search allowed to run its course without the one theory its incident commander actually held. He gets a superb confession and a self-interested speech about how nobody exterminates lions or crocodiles, and the novel declines to let him off.
One adult never patronises anybody: a grandmother who hangs dried flowers over her doorframes and strings bottles in a redbud tree against the voices she used to hear from the tree line. Her grandson mocks all of it. He is wrong too.
What In the Woods They Wait by Carrie Lee South Does With a Friendship
The best relationship is not the romance, though it almost becomes one twice and the book is clever about why not. On her first day at a new school a boy pretends he has never heard her name, the kindest act in five hundred pages. He drives her to school, lets her rage without offering thoughts and prayers, and stays after every volunteer and both parents are gone.
He is also the one who will not believe her, and their fight about it hurts more than anything the forest does, because he is being reasonable. A one-line letter of his, read out later in a solicitor’s office, is the best writing here, and I will not spoil it.
Where In the Woods They Wait by Carrie Lee South Loses Its Grip
- The plot needs its heroine to break rules she teaches other people. Two unsecured caves without kit, and a backcountry trip with nobody told where she went, days after lecturing a colleague on that exact point. The book names the problem rather than fixing it.
- The teenage chapters sag. The grandmother scenes and one agonising hospital sequence matter. A prom storyline and a broad funeral salesman do not.
- The scientist is a lecture with a grudge attached, appearing once to explain things, once to close a door, then in a credit at the end.
- The rescued child barely exists, given a few eerie lines while sedated before departing offstage, and the finish wants more from her survival than it has earned.
- The last act arrives as press cuttings, which turns something terrifying into a classification.
Groups wanting more should try When the Bones Sing by Ginny Myers Sain, same hills and stranger about what it digs up, or Stay Buried by Jennifer McMahon for a cold case with the same rural dread. Fast Boys and Pretty Girls by Lo Patrick suits anyone who came to In the Woods They Wait by Carrie Lee South for a small Southern town that will not discuss itself, and The Missing Half by Ashley Flowers is the companion on a sibling who never stops. As a chaser, Monsters in the Archives by Caroline Bicks is good-humoured on why we frighten ourselves on purpose.
For the Group
Start with the ledger, because it splits rooms. A sixteen-year-old made a cruel choice and hid it for fifteen years. A man with authority over a public park sat on what he knew for thirty, including through the search for that same boy. Which is the greater failure, and does it matter that only one of them was a child?
Then take his defence seriously. Dangerous animals live everywhere and we do not destroy them; a fragile ecosystem owes us nothing. He is not obviously wrong. Is he entitled to that argument while still taking bookings for the campground?
Then absolution. Somebody offers her a statistical version late on: plenty of teenagers have made her exact decision and almost none lost a sibling to it. She refuses. Should she have?
One practical warning before anyone picks this. In the Woods They Wait by Carrie Lee South becomes a sustained, specific arachnid novel, unsurvivable for that phobia. It also holds two on-page predation deaths of named adults, an animal killed on a small farm, a child used as live bait, a parent’s drinking cleaned up by her teenage daughter, life support withdrawn, and claustrophobia that will stop some readers cold.
Final Thoughts
In the Woods They Wait by Carrie Lee South is a first novel and shows it at the joins, but it is after something better than a scare. Its horror and its grief run on one mechanism: the withholding of an explanation. A woman cannot mourn because nothing was confirmed. An official cannot act because nobody accepts what he saw. A mother cannot release one object because objects are the only proof a person occurred. Each is stuck in the space where an answer belongs, and the book understands that the space is the wound.
The dedication is to the author’s own brother, and it reads differently before you start than after. Nothing here can tell you whether the final fifty pages read as resolution or conjuring trick, and I doubt a group will agree. What is beyond argument is everything before the creature: two people loving each other badly in a house full of rubbish, waiting fifteen years for somebody to come back and say what happened.
