Review: Don’t Let the Forest In by CG Drews

Title: Don’t Let the Forest In

Author: CG Drews

Length: 336 Pages

Category: Dark Fairy Tale, Fantasy, YA, Horror

Rating: 4 Stars

At a Glance: Don’t Let the Forest In is esoteric and honest, unhurried and delivers some great twists that made me go back and read chapter one again to see how it all fit together. It is the darkest of dark fairy tales.

Reviewed By: Lisa

Blurb: Once upon a time, Andrew had cut out his heart and given it to this boy, and he was very sure Thomas had no idea that Andrew would do anything for him. Protect him. Lie for him.

Kill for him.

High school senior Andrew Perrault finds refuge in the twisted fairytales that he writes for the only person who can ground him to reality—Thomas Rye, the boy with perpetually ink-stained hands and hair like autumn leaves. And with his twin sister, Dove, inexplicably keeping him at a cold distance upon their return to Wickwood Academy, Andrew finds himself leaning on his friend even more.

But something strange is going on with Thomas. His abusive parents have mysteriously vanished, and he arrives at school with blood on his sleeve. Thomas won’t say a word about it, and shuts down whenever Andrew tries to ask him questions. Stranger still, Thomas is haunted by something, and he seems to have lost interest in his artwork—whimsically macabre sketches of the monsters from Andrew’s wicked stories.

Desperate to figure out what’s wrong with his friend, Andrew follows Thomas into the off-limits forest one night and catches him fighting a nightmarish monster—Thomas’s drawings have come to life and are killing anyone close to him. To make sure no one else dies, the boys battle the monsters every night. But as their obsession with each other grows stronger, so do the monsters, and Andrew begins to fear that the only way to stop the creatures might be to destroy their creator…

Review: “Life didn’t fit against his skin and it never had and sometimes everything was just too much.”

Andrew Perrault is on a journey, one filled with anxiety, disordered eating, depression, questioning where and how he fits into his world, and doing so in a place that is both a waking nightmare and a slumbering hellscape. Andrew is a schism between what is real and what isn’t, and CG Drews uses florid prose and vivid imagery to draw the lines between what blooms in Andrew’s mind as real and what readers see as impossible to perceive, yet brilliantly terrifying all at once.

Don’t Let the Forest In is the darkest of dark fairy tales. The woods bordering Wickwood Academy aren’t a setting; they are a character, a living, breathing, murdering space devoid of conscience or remorse, but full of needs and an appetite for flesh and blood. The landscape not only takes its due, it demands it from those who dare to enter and disturb. Those who love the legends of the forests and what they often symbolize: the unknown, the dangerous, the mysterious, the obscured will find that in this disturbing place.

Andrew and the boy he loves, Thomas Rye, and the forest are allegory and archetype. What is real and what isn’t is not as integral to their story as whether they will survive when they become consumed by their fears and anxieties, and the forest comes to collect its pound of flesh. With that in mind, Don’t Let the Forest In is not a YA Romance novel. In fact, though Andrew loves Thomas, is in love with him, a significant part of Andrew’s narrative involves his asexuality and his reconciling that with his love for Thomas. Drews exams this in some powerful ways.

We all get that it’s imperative to have books available in the world that offer teens and young adults the opportunity to see themselves, that they aren’t alone in their feelings, that what makes them feel different doesn’t mean they’re broken. Don’t Let the Forest In does that. It’s esoteric and honest, unhurried and delivers some great twists that made me go back and read chapter one again to see how it all fit together. It also includes mentions of physical abuse, death, and body horror, so consider yourself cautioned.