In a clearing in the woods, a carousel turns slowly in the wind. The horses have been there long enough that the paint has gone and the eyes have rusted into black hollows, and the whole frame screams when the weather pushes it. A little further along, the frame of a Ferris wheel stands against the sky with nothing left to carry. Nobody put these here for atmosphere. There really was an amusement park on Big Island in Lake Minnetonka, and it really did fail. Buried in the Woods Below by Daniel G. Miller takes that fact, keeps the ruins, and supplies the one thing the historical record never did.
The Park That Really Stood There
Big Island Park opened in August 1906 and drew something like fifteen thousand people on its first day. It had a roller coaster, a music casino, an aquarium and a tower carrying a newly fashionable electric light, and it had been built by a streetcar company that wanted a reason for people to ride to the end of the line and then board a boat. It lasted five seasons. The thing that killed it was arithmetic. A Minnesota amusement park earns nothing for half the year, and by 1911 the sums had stopped working.
That is the whole of it. No disaster, no scandal, no child falling from a great height into a crowd. In an author’s note at the back, Miller says so directly and with some charm, confirming that the island is real, that the annual festival across the water in Wayzata is real, and that Big Island is free of ghosts, axes and slow psychological collapse. He shifted the festival date by a few days. He invented everything else.
What Buried in the Woods Below by Daniel G. Miller does with that gap is worth thinking about, because it is a common move and it is rarely done this cleanly. The novel keeps the true part, which is the decay, and grafts on a false part, which is a girl who fell from the Ferris wheel and never left. The invention is small. Its effect is enormous, because it converts a set of rusting metal into a place with a grievance.
What Buried in the Woods Below Does With the Ruins
The narrator, Charlotte Hoffman, is a Chicago consultant on enforced leave, invited back to Minnesota by the family of a childhood friend. She has not been to Big Island before. Everybody else on the island has a version of its history, and none of the versions agree.
To the man who owns the house she is staying in, the ruins are a selling point and the island is an acquisition. He wants all of it, house by house, and he says so cheerfully over the grill. To his neighbour, a pipe-smoking holdout whose mother died in that same house, the island is inherited ground and the newcomers are a slow eviction. To his eight-year-old daughters, the island has a ghost, and the ghost is useful, because a child who can borrow a dead girl’s authority can make an adult do almost anything. And to Charlotte, who counts stairs and paces and floorboards to keep her balance, the island is simply somewhere the counting does not work.
This is the sharpest thing in the novel and it has nothing to do with the plot. Nobody living on Big Island is describing the same island. Buried in the Woods Below by Daniel G. Miller understands that a place with a ruin in it becomes a story that people compete to own, and that the competition is what turns neighbours into suspects long before anyone has done anything wrong.
A Place That Will Not Let Anyone Off
Setting is also doing the mechanical work here, and it is worth admiring how little machinery the novel needs.
The island is reachable only by water. That single geographical fact removes the police, the ambulance, the neighbours who might hear a scream and the friend who might drive over. Add a boat with a starter that has been unreliable since chapter one, a mechanic who cannot come out until tomorrow, cell coverage that has never been good on this stretch of the lake, and a September storm with a tornado warning behind it, and the cast is sealed in without a single locked door. Buried in the Woods Below by Daniel G. Miller does not have to contrive a snowbound manor or a cut telephone line. It just has to be honest about what an island is.
The decay earns its keep in the same way. A carousel nobody maintains is not a symbol that has been placed in the woods. It is what happens when a company goes bankrupt and walks away, and the novel keeps returning to it not because it means something but because it is on the path between two houses. When the last act arrives at that clearing, the location has been visited so many times in daylight that it does not read as staging. It reads as the only place anyone could have ended up.
Where Buried in the Woods Below Presses Too Hard
The restraint that governs the island does not extend to the house. Buried in the Woods Below by Daniel G. Miller keeps almost all of its Gothic in one building, and then overfills it.
- The Gothic inventory is overstocked. Antique dolls wigged in human hair, a coin-fed fortune teller that produces ominous cards on cue, a mirror whose crack widens across the week, and a dog named after a Brontë character. The island did not need the help.
- The night sequences repeat. A sound outside the window, a crouched approach, a figure in the fog, an explanation. Four variations on one movement is at least one too many.
- Two characters exist to be looked at sideways. The reclusive neighbour and a bartender who turns up unannounced are both given motive and almost no interior life.
- The weather writing over-reaches. Miller is unshowy for long stretches and then hands a single storm three separate similes in the space of a page.
Readers who want the register of Buried in the Woods Below by Daniel G. Miller with a colder eye on the water should try Pike Island by Tony Wirt. Those who prefer their haunted architecture to stay ambiguous will get more out of Solace House by Will Maclean. And The Orphanage by the Lake remains the best entry point to this author, being the more conventional and more confident of the two. On content, the novel includes sexual harassment and assault, the killing of children, the poisoning of a dog, childhood abuse, and extended depictions of psychiatric crisis and detention.
Where It Leaves You
There is a moment two thirds through where Charlotte, unable to sleep, thinks of an old film her mother once made her watch, in which a group of dinner guests find they cannot leave the room and slowly come apart. She wonders whether the same thing is happening on the island. It is a small aside and the book does not press it, but it is the most accurate sentence in the novel about its own design. Nothing supernatural holds these people in place. A boat engine holds them, and a weather front, and the fact that each of them has decided the island belongs to them and leaving would be a concession.
Buried in the Woods Below by Daniel G. Miller is a book club novel almost by accident, because the argument it starts is not about who did it. It is about whether Buried in the Woods Below by Daniel G. Miller is entitled to hang an invented tragedy on a real place, and whether the author’s note at the back settles the debt or merely acknowledges it. Miller is generous about it, and funny, and clear that the island’s only real casualty was a balance sheet. But the ruins in the trees are genuine, and anyone who visits Big Island after reading this will be looking at them differently. That is the trade the novel makes. It takes a place whose past is merely sad and gives it a past that is frightening, and the frightening version is the one that sticks.