Darkly Wood is, as far as I know, the first novel by Max Power, the Irish author with the coolest name on the planet.

Darkly Wood seems, from the outset, to be a simple horror story but is actually far more.  It details the misadventures of Daisy May Coppertop and her ill-advised entry into the titular woods near her house.  Things go bad and the wood becomes much more than they prototypical scary woods you tend to find in average horror stories.  In an average horror story our heroine would have barely escaped and then we’d have the literary equivalent of a fading scene of someone else standing at the edge of the wood, thinking about going in.  We would have been given all the answers and at least a couple teenagers would have been killed.

This is not an average horror story.  This is a richly textured story that…