That Night in the Woods by Kristopher Triana

I received this book for free from the Publisher in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

That Night in the Woods by Kristopher Triana
Published by Cemetery Dance Publications on October 13, 2023
ISBN: 9781587679032
Genres: Fiction, Horror, Occult & Supernatural
Pages: 370
Format: ARC, eBook
Source: NetGalley, Publisher
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When Jennifer receives a message from Scott Dwyer after twenty years without contact, her first reaction is one of excitement. Scott was her first love. Now in her forties and in the middle of a divorce, nostalgia for her youth gets the better of her.

Scott invites Jennifer to his house in Redford, the town she grew up in. It's a place she's tried to put behind her, for not all childhood memories are sunny. When she accepts Scott's invite, she struggles with mixed feelings, especially when she learns of the death of Steven Winters, one of her childhood friends.

Scott invites three people from their past to honor Steven's memory-Corey, Traci, and Mark. But the group is more than old friends. They share a dark secret that has troubled them for decades. Now it's time to face their traumatic pasts. Together, they must unravel the mystery of what happened in the patch of forest behind Scott's house, a place once known as Suicide Woods.

From the author of Gone to See the River Man comes a chilling novel that reminds us that old ghosts are the ones that haunt us most.

Kristopher Triana is a Splatterpunk Award winning author. His works include Full Brutal (Awarded Best Novel at the 2019 Splatterpunk Awards), Toxic Love, Shepherd of the Black Sheep, The Ruin Season, Body Art, The Detained and Growing Dark. His fiction has appeared in many magazines, anthologies, audio books and on websites, and has been translated to multiple languages. His fiction has drawn praise from Publisher's Weekly, Rue Morgue Magazine, Cemetery Dance, Scream Magazine and such prominent authors as Brian Keene, Jack Ketchum, Bryan Smith and Ryan Harding. While primarily a horror writer, he also writes crime fiction, literary fiction, noir and westerns. He also is a columnist with Backwoods Survival Guide Magazine.

He also has a very strong love of animals-especially dogs.

He lives in Connecticut.

"Kristopher Triana is without question one of the very best of the new breed of horror writers." - Bryan Smith, author of 68 Kill

That Night in the Woods by Kristopher Triana is a story reminiscent of The Losers Club from IT, in that a group of five friends meet up after twenty years to celebrate and mourn the loss of one of the group, Steven. I’m afraid that’s where the comparison ends. This unfortunately wasn’t a book that worked for me. It was a real slog to get through it and I did think about DNF’ing it at several points. The story starts off extremely slow and the POV’s alternating without warning and did find myself getting frustrated.

That Night in the Woods follows Jennifer, Traci, Corey and Mark coming back to Redford after Scott gets back in touch with them to inform them of the passing of their friend Steven. Each friend seems to be at different stages of their lives – some are married, some divorced all still quite immature, but one thing that was blindingly obvious is that they’re all miserable. When they arrive at Scott’s (who still resides in Redford) the awkwardness is off the scale, and they all just seem to immediately fall back into their teenage selves.

This is one of the issues I had with the story – the falling back into past behaviours. Here they are all meeting up again after twenty years and they suddenly forget about jobs, families, responsibilities. I just found I had to suspend disbelief a little too much. Scott presents them with information relating to Steven’s death, mysterious journals, new details and then again with the acting like teenagers, despite hearing about the new details and Jennifer going through a recent divorce, falls into bed with Scott. I mean there’s no way in hell I’d sleep with an ex again, especially after twenty years, I just wasn’t buying it.

They revisit that night twenty years ago, that night in the woods, that night they vowed to never speak of again, and here they are speaking of it again. The story went back and forth and when I got to the scene of them in the woods, I was fully expecting to have the pants scared off me, but it just wasn’t what I had been expecting.

That Night in the Woods had so much potential, but I was just left feeling so deflated by the whole experience. I have the author’s other works on my TBR and will be reading them, but this just wasn’t for me. Again, this is a subjective view and may be different for everyone.

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