The Woods Are Always Watching by Stephanie PerkinsMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
GODDAMN THIS WAS GOOD!
Sign me up for everything this woman writes from here on out.
Two girls are going hiking. Unfortunately for these best friends, their inexperience and a few nasty secrets the woods are hiding are going to make for a bad time.
Straight away, you can feel the tension seeping in. The girls are BFFs but everyone knows misery loves company so their positive attitudes are soon transformed by pain, heat, exhaustion ... you name it. These two girls are not enjoying their first experience of hiking.
The beauty of this story is in how it takes this ordinary hiking adventure and makes it ominous. You really do get the sense that something is out there but you want to brush it off as irrational. The tension builds slow and steady until everything goes horrifically wrong and the terror latches on and refuses to let go.
The relationship between the two girls is quite fun, because you get the best friends whose friendship is tested by hardship. They're having a really tough time so its not long before they start snapping at each other and you begin to wonder if their friendship will survive the trip.
It's hard to talk too much about this one without giving things away, but safe to say I was hooked from start to finish. I was sucked into the atmosphere of this one, and it reads like a horror movie so I was easily able to see it all play out in my mind.
I'm pretty stingy with my 5-star ratings and the only thing that prevents this one getting it is the re-read-ability factor: so much of my enjoyment of this one was in the tension and not knowing what was going to happen, so I'm not sure it would hold up for a re-read. However it was a LOT of fun, so I'm gonna go ahead and call this one 4.5 stars.
Highly recommend for people wanting a short dabble in the horror genre. It's a simple, tense story filled with memorable moments that will leave you shuddering.
With thanks to Macmillan for a copy
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