The Only Path Through the Midnight Woods

Sarah Hollowell, A Dark and Starless Forest

Nine children and their teacher live a cloistered life in a secluded house in northern Indiana, practicing their magic and avoiding the outside world. Though these children, mostly girls (and one enby), will eventually grow into awesome powers, they’re currently too young to defend against a hostile world. Until they learn, they live by a few simple rules. Don’t use magic recklessly; don’t go into the forest; and above all, don’t cross Frank.

This novel’s Shirley Jackson-esque premise drew me in without hesitation. Like Jackson, Hollowell places her characters in a setting that physically isolates them from the larger world, forcing them to rely upon one another. Then she makes them, in different ways, unreliable. Throughout the novel, some oppressive presence looms constantly over the characters. But what is that presence and what does it want?

Derry, our first-person narrator, has a deeply conflicted relationship with her surrogate father, Frank. He’s taught her to control her superpowers since her parents unceremoniously dumped her at his doorstep. Frank is gentle, paternal, and patient, as long as Derry and the other students comply. But he punishes the slightest sign of willfulness strictly. And Derry is a restless teenager, learning to chafe at his authority.

Meanwhile, Derry has a secret: she and a few other students have discovered a secret tunnel leading to the forbidden forest. A tunnel only magically gifted students can access. This liberates them from Frank’s often arbitrary dominion, but at a cost: Derry and her sister Jane saw something in the wood. Derry won’t tell us what, but she believes it’s connected when, one summer midnight, Jane apparently disappears into darkness.

Hollowell creates a world defined by narrowness and constriction. Frank collects his students from parents frightened of their children’s nascent powers. Yet as the story develops, and Frank seems no closer to discovering where Jane went, Derry slowly realizes they only know what Frank tells them. What motivates Frank to teach his students, while protecting him from a putatively hostile world? He won’t tell, and Derry can’t guess.

Sarah Hollowell

To find answers, Derry must improve her supernatural abilities, and use them in ways Frank has never taught her. Though Derry describes her fellow students’ powers as magical, and Frank calls his students “alchemists,” the students don’t learn diverse spells from grimoires. Rather, they have unique powers which Frank helps them cultivate. The school thus looks less like Hogwart’s, more like Xavier’s School for Gifted Children.

Outside Frank’s door, the forbidden forest starts calling Derry. Soon enough, she breaks one of Frank’s inviolable rules and ventures in alone. There she finds a mysterious figure who promises to reveal the truth which Frank has spent years concealing. But how can Derry decide who’s telling the truth? And what must she do when the forest begins demanding more from her than she feels prepared to give?

It’s tempting to seek parallels in Hollowell’s narrative. Derry, our narrator, resembles Hollowell herself: bespectacled, fat (her word, not mine), and gender-nonconforming. The symbolism of the isolated childhood, the authoritative father figure, and the desire to see the outside world, are pretty glaring. On a tenth-grade book report level, Hollowell’s themes of young adulthood and the need to break parental chains loom large.

But such one-to-one interpretations place limits on Hollowell’s gripping, fast-paced story. Derry wants answers, while Frank continues treating her and her foster family as permanent children. One after another, Frank’s students vanish, first under darkness, later in broad daylight. They leave no trace, and Frank’s efforts to maintain order become increasingly Spartan. Derry ultimately wants what everyone wants: to see the world with her own eyes.

Hollowell handles the necessary tone shifts to tell an engaging story. Derry describes the house, the forest, and her foster family with the lush detail you’d expect from Frank’s low-tech curriculum. But when she needs more muscular storytelling force, she has it, and key scenes explode with vigor. The book runs over 350 pages without ever feeling long. And she keeps twelve mononymic characters in constant play without cluttering the story landscape.

This book is marketed as a Young Adult novel, which perhaps isn’t surprising, considering its mainly young cast and coming-of-age themes. But like the best children’s literature, it offers plenty for adults: themes of authority versus independence, for instance, and exactly how terrifying the outside world really is. Hollowell writes with nail-biting tension that keeps readers up past their bedtimes, and she tells a story as timely and pertinent as it is scary and fun.