Sleepaway camps were never really a thing where and when I grew up, though that didn’t keep me from daydreaming about going to one just like the ones I read about in books. It seems my fascination with this kind of atmosphere, at once contained and wild, still continues, if the rate at which I devoured Liz Moore’s latest novel, The God of the Woods, is any indication.
One August night in 1975, a camper goes missing from her bunk. It’s enough of a nightmare scenario for the camp counselors all on its own, but the missing camper happens to be the daughter of the camp’s owners. Worse still, Barbara is the second child the Van Laar family has had go missing in these same woods: fourteen years ago, their eight-year-old son vanished in these very same woods. The police response is immediate and aggressive—no volunteer league search party this time around. It doesn’t take long for suspicion to fall on…well, everyone. In the seemingly idyllic summer camp, the kinds of minor and everyday deceptions that everyone trades suddenly take on sinister connotations.
In addition to the investigation sifting through the various accounts of the present, the events of fourteen years before are dredged up with new meaning. From the suspect who died before standing trial to the distant and grieving parents, investigators are stretched too thin and have both too much and too little information to go on. And then, of course, there’s the escaped prisoner roaming the woods—the same prisoner who was arrested fourteen years ago not too far from camp. There’s far too many coincidences to the two disappearances to be by chance, but there also aren’t enough clues to see how they connect as the days and nights stretch on without a hint of where Barbara went.
Although The God of the Woods is centered on the disappearance of a child and doesn’t stray terribly far from that premise, the reality of this novel is something far more interesting. Told from multiple points of view, Woods dances between characters and timelines—often delineated clearly, but sometimes less so, giving the account an untethered quality that lingers even after you’ve placed it in the timeline. It ends up being an ingenious move, given that these loose and unmarked recollections are from the point of view of a character whose own grip on reality is a little loose.
Within these varied accounts are scattered clues, many of which are eventually uncovered by the investigators. But Moore isn’t concerned with crafting a whodunnit so much as a careful sketch of a far more human story. There’s Barbara’s bunkmate feeling forgotten by her divorced father and seeing Barbara’s friendship as a way of building a new identity—even if Barbara isn’t the perfect friend. The camp counselor from the wrong side of the tracks whose silver-spooned boyfriend comes with a steeper cost than she expected. The first female investigator in the state police who has to commute two hours a day because her ultra-conservative family can’t fathom an unmarried woman moving out on her own.
There are no easy answers in Woods, and indeed few easy questions in this summer camp. Instead of being a mystery or a crime novel, Woods considers instead how easily it can be to become a suspect, the gulf a tax bracket can open up between people living in the same town or even house, and how many little mysteries there are in even the most mundane of lives. And although this may not be a thriller or a whodunnit in the conventional sense, it had me racing through nearly 500 pages just to see what came next—yet also wanting to savor every richly imagined detail in every unraveling plotline.
Ring Reads 