Overview

A January Indie Next Pick! ""A visceral, unflinching, and emotionally powerful horror novel...this is Gould at her most poignant and most electric."" -Ava Reid, #1 New York Times bestselling author of A Study in Drowning Yellowjackets meets Girl, Interrupted when a group of troubled teens in a wilderness therapy program find themselves stranded in a forest full of monsters eager to take their place. Devin Green wakes in the middle of the night to find two men in her bedroom. No stranger to a fight, she calls to her foster parents for help, but it soon becomes clear this is a planned abduction--one everyone but Devin signed up for. She's shoved in a van and driven deep into the Idaho woods, where she's dropped off with a cohort of equally confused teens. Finally, two camp counselors inform them that they've all been enrolled in an experimental therapy program. If the campers can learn to change their self-destructive ways--and survive a fifty-days hike through the wilderness--they'll come out the other side as better versions of themselves. Or so the counselors say. Devin is immediately determined to escape. She's also determined to ignore Sheridan, the cruel-mouthed, lavender-haired bully who mocks every group exercise. But there's something strange about these woods--inhuman faces appearing between the trees, visions of people who shouldn't be there flashing in the leaves--and when the campers wake up to find both counselors missing, therapy becomes the least of their problems. Stranded and left to fend for themselves, the teens quickly realize they'll have to trust each other if they want to survive. But what lies in the woods may not be as dangerous as what the campers are hiding from each other--and if the monsters have their way, no one will leave the woods alive. Atmospheric and sharp, What the Woods Took is a poignant story of transformation that explores the price of becoming someone--or something--new. ""Unsettling, raw, and absolutely terrifying. Gould tears open the tender, angry heart of teenage friendship and what happens when our loved ones fail us."" -Trang Thanh Tran, New York Times bestselling author of She is a Haunting

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9781250340672

Table of Contents

Reviews

"Praise for What the Woods Took: The Nerd Daily, ""Get Your Hands On These Anticipated July To December 2024 Book Releases"" ""This is pitch-perfect survival horror with heart, with purpose beyond scares, and it still delivers a hell of a fright. An absolute must-read."" - Alison Ames, author of It Looks Like Us ""A spooky, intimately woven page-turner that effortlessly balances complex monster horror with tender character dynamics.""- Ryan Douglass, New York Times bestselling author of The Taking of Jake Livingston ""Haunting and cuttingly tender, What The Woods Took has it all: slippery twists, satisfying scares, and a breathless sapphic romance."" -- Ann Fraistat, author of What We Harvest and A Place For Vanishing ""Weaves a fierce, prickly love story through the heart of a bone-chilling horror."" - Elizabeth Kilcoyne, award-winning author of Wake The Bones ""Courtney Gould is a master of psychological horror."" - Rebecca Mahoney, author of The Valley and the Flood and The Memory Eater ""A visceral, unflinching, and emotionally powerful horror novel...this is Gould at her most poignant and most electric."" -Ava Reid, #1 New York Times bestselling author of A Study in Drowning ""Courtney Gould deepens her signature psychological scares into a survivalist tale that's dripping with pain, hope, and self-love."" -Adam Sass, award-winning author of Surrender Your Sons ""With prose as sharp as snapping branches and a tense yet tender sapphic romance, each page oozes with atmosphere, leaving readers no choice but to contend with the terrifying idea that the monsters lurking in the woods look a lot like the ones we carry with us."" -- Adrienne Tooley, author of The Third Daughter and Sweet & Bitter Magic ""Unsettling, raw, and absolutely terrifying. Gould tears open the tender, angry heart of teenage friendship and what happens when our loved ones fail us."" -Trang Thanh Tran, New York Times bestselling author of She is a Haunting"

"Praise for Courtney Gould: ""Gould's masterfully sensory descriptions of rural life will have you inhaling rusty road dust and feeling the sweat-slicked leather of a car seat in the sun sticking to your thighs from page one...you can physically feel time and space closing in as the mystery unfolds."" -Paste Magazine on Where Echoes Die ""[A] supernatural thrill ride...[Gould] carefully weaves together a powerful portrait of grief and healing that's equal parts unnerving and heartbreaking."" -Publishers Weekly (starred) on Where Echoes Die ""Two sisters head to the desert to find the truth behind their mother's death in this moody, atmospheric detective story."" -LitHub on Where Echoes Die ""Spooky atmosphere seeps out of every pore of this slow burn ghost story."" - Buzzfeed on The Dead and the Dark ""A complex and sophisticated thriller with haunting real-world connections."" - Kirkus Reviews (starred) on The Dead and the Dark ""A riveting, spooky and expertly-crafted debut from a talented new voice in YA fiction."" - Courtney Summers, New York Times bestselling author of Sadie on The Dead and the Dark"

Author Information

COURTNEY GOULD writes books about queer girls, ghosts, and things that go bump in the night. She graduated from Pacific Lutheran University in 2016 with a Bachelor's degree in Creative Writing and Publishing. She was born and raised in Salem, OR, where she continues to write love letters to the haunted girls and rural, empty spaces. She is the author of The Dead and the Dark and Where Echoes Die.

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