That Night in the Woods - Kristopher Triana

This horror/thriller follows a group of friends 20 years after one Halloween night changed their lives forever.  When Scott Dwyer calls out of the blue to invite the fractured friend group back together, they are all a bit wary of returning to Redford.  But each of them - Jennifer, Corey, Traci, and Mark - agree to come and honor the memory of their recently passed friend, Steven.  As the group begin to reminisce about their teenage years, Scott breaches the vow they made to never speak of that one night.  
 

We get a good mix of characters - but I found them to be on the caricature side of the spectrum.  While the group hadn't spoken in many years, I didn't get a good feeling that they were ever really friends.  Even in the flashbacks, it felt like more of a gathering of acquaintances rather than an established friend group.  We get a brief introduction to most of the characters before they gather together but I wanted more time to establish their characters now so the comparison between then and now would be more clear.  There is some substantial character change during the ending climax but since I didn't get a good sense of the characters to begin with, this change didn't hit me the way I think it was meant to.

The horror elements in this were spectacular and there were so many chilling moments.  There are 2 timelines in this story and the past timeline, where we are seeing what happened that night in the woods, reminded me of All Hallows by Christopher Golden.  We get the creepy people in the maybe haunted forest and a group of friends who are trying to be logical about it all but also aren't sure what they are experiencing.  There's also a fair amount of gore in the last 25% or so of the read which I wasn't really expecting but I think worked well given the escalation with the plot.  

I think the standout element by far is the tension Triana was able to craft.  While the dual timelines do alternate, we get pretty big chunks at one time.  There isn't a whole lot of back and forth that would normally help to build tension through the structure of the book so the meat of the story really needed to do the heavy lifting.  As we get more reveals, the tension amps up because each reveal has some pretty far-reaching consequences.  These aren't just "oh, X did Y" type of reveals.  It is "X did Y which means that A and B ended up C which would mean..." type of reveals.  There's also a good amount of interpersonal tension with the friend group and the fallout of that night in the woods.  We get multiple POVs so tension is built that way as well where we see certain characters and their internal thoughts or desires. 

The ending lost me, which is a real shame.  Plot-wise, the ending was actually was a little off the rails but in a way that I usually like.  However, I found the plot development to clash with the character development.  There were certain characters that felt like they had complete personality shift in the last 30 pages or so which didn't work for me.  I also found a bit of the explanation/reveal of the ending to be a bit info-dumpy in a way that made it feel rushed.  Like we could have had this information woven into the scene a little more but instead it felt like the reader was being pushed toward the ending before I was ready for it.  

Overall, I enjoyed parts of the story but it didn't quite come together perfectly for me.  Fantastic horror elements and tension building but the characters and ending ended up feeling a little misaligned. 

Thanks to NetGalley and Cemetery Dance Publications for the ARC.

Expected publication date is October 7, 2023