The Book that Launched Ruth Ware: In a Dark, Dark Wood

 

 

 

 

IN A DARK, DARK WOOD (2015)

By Ruth Ware

Scout Press, 308 pages.

★★★★

 

Ruth Ware is among that small elite whose novels are declared “instant classics” and leaps onto lists of “best sellers” before they are actually released. She wasn’t always thus. Her first five books were young-adult fantasies about witches written under her full name, Ruth Warburton. Then she wrote In a Dark, Dark Wood and her career skyrocketed. Since she published it in 2015, NPR declared it the year’s best novel. It was optioned for both a movie and TV, though I don’t think the film was ever made. Nonetheless, Dark, Dark Wood made Ware a publisher’s dream: a writer whose books sell. She has written a book a year since 2015, an output upon which I will comment, but first let’s take a trip to the woods.

 

I read In a Dark, Dark Wood when it first came out and thought it a good thriller. That genre of novel seldom gets excessive praise from readers who claim they like “literature,” meaning thick classic literary works (usually English or Irish). They get reprinted by Penguin, usually in mouse type. I’ll bet, though, that many literary snobs secretly read Ruth Ware. Hers are heart-thumping reads that give you a bigger scare than most blood-gushing horror tales.

 

The main character is Leonora Shaw, a successful crime fiction writer living in London. It has been 10 years since college graduation, and she has been partnerless since her breakup with James Cooper at school. “Nora” enjoys city life, running, and solitude when she’s writing. To her surprise she gets an email asking if she’s like to attend a “hen” (bachelorette) party for Clare. Who? Sure enough, it’s little Ms Perfect–Clare Cavendish, a person she envied and sometimes hung out with in college. But the email is from “Flo,” who claims to be her best friend, though “Nora” (she was known as Lee or Leo in college) has never heard of Flo. The only friend from college Nora is still in touch with is Nina, now a doctor. They make a mutual pact to go, even though the party is at Flo’s aunt’s home in the Kielder Forest section of Northumberland. For two Londoners, that’s akin to asking them to vacation in Siberia. But at least Nina has a car; Nora doesn’t know how to drive.  

 

The home is actually very nice if you can picture an English version of colonial revival furnishing. Nora, who everyone calls “Lee,” though she corrects them, immediately wants to flee. It’s freezing cold along the Scottish Borderlands and creepy deep in the woods. To make matters worse, there is shaky Wi-Fi and the land line is unreliable. Just six people show up: Flo, Nora, Nina, Melanie (who has a six-month-old baby that she regrets leaving), and eventually Clare and Tom, a gay actor, who knows Clare from a fundraiser and the still-unknown bridegroom whom Tom knows from the theatre. Flo acts the role of the sheepdog who rounds up everyone for the kind of games and ice breakers that you’ve grown to hate since you were no longer 14. She has quiz and game challenges, a Ouija board, and even takes them skeet shooting (to Clare’s horror!). Even creepier, her outfits echo Clare’s as do many of her mannerisms. Nora runs in the forest, which empties out to the main road, and spends time with Nina complaining of her feelings of creepiness. An old gun said to be filled with blanks hangs about the mantlepiece–can you say Chekov’s gun–that Flo’s aunt uses to scare rabbits from the garden.

 

Strange things go bump in the night, unknown footprints in the snow, a banging open back door in the middle of the night, a Ouija board message, five frightened guests (Melanie bailed that morning), a gunshot, panic, and Clare’s full-speed sprint through the woods and brambles. When she comes to, she’s in a hospital with no memory of how she got there. When interviewed by the police she realizes that she’s a possible murder suspect. Who? How? Say what?

 

Again, this book was a massive hit for Ruth Ware and threw her into the book-a-year routine. If there’s anything popular culture demands, it’s milking a franchise until it’s spitting up blood. Ware is the mistress of novels about women feeling trapped, anxiety, gaslighting, and murder. To her credit, she changes settings and circumstances, though the loner woman is a repeated theme. Laura “Lo” Blackstock plays that role in The Woman in Cabin 11 (2016) and its (semi-) sequel The Woman in Suite 12 (2025), though the first was at sea and the latter in a blizzard-isolated Swiss luxury hotel. There is generally a reason why the protagonist can’t flee from danger: old and new lies that must be resolved –The Lying Game (2017), The Death of Mrs. Westaway (2018), The It Girl (2022)– or an entrapping remote location– the Scottish Highlands in Turn of the Key (2019), the French Alps in One by One (2020), an island cut off by a storm in One Perfect Couple (2024)…. As you can no doubt infer from titles, she often reworks or updates Agatha Christe novels. There are also traces of Daphne du Maurier.

 

But here’s the thing. I’ve read every one of Ware’s post-witch novels except Zero Days. Who can resist a TV reality show that turns into a deadly high-stake episode of Survivor (One Perfect Couple). Call her work formulaic–aren’t most novels? –but Ruth Ware knows her audience.

 

Rob Weir