Book review: In A Dark, Dark Wood

Ruth Ware – In A Dark, Dark Wood

There is perhaps something a bit too familiar about the setting of this debut thriller: a big house next to a forest, far away from the rest of civilisation. A weekend where friends gather and something unsettling is about to happen. What sets this apart is that it’s a hen party, and the juxtaposition of pink fluffy boas with this kind of darkness is quite delightful indeed.

Nora hasn’t set eyes on her former best friend Clare in ten years, but when she’s invited to her hen party, curiosity gets the better of her – and the other friend from school she’s kept in touch with has agreed to go too. It doesn’t take long before she discovers who Clare’s marrying: Nora’s old boyfriend James, who she hasn’t been able to entirely forget and who is the main reason she left town at sixteen. The circumstances around this breakup prove to be less unusual than they might have been, and I would have loved to see more of their teenage selves throughout the book. Nevertheless, the uncertainty over what actually happens on the last night of the hen – a night that leaves at least one person dead and Nora in hospital trying to piece together what exactly happened – does propel the story along for most of the book.

There are some nitpicks I have about this book: Nora seems far too aware of how much she owes a girl who befriended her at age five, despite never having been in the position of not having a friend; the characters all seem far too ‘together’ for people in their mid-to-late twenties; the characterisation of Clare boils down to ‘sociopath’; there’s a ouija board. It didn’t surprise me enough (and I don’t read enough thrillers to be jaded about the genre). But I still enjoyed it a lot; the hen party awfulness is absolutely spot-on and the interactions between the attendees (including a snarky doctor and an utterly hyper maid of honour) works wonderfully.