Macabre Monsters and Bloody Fairytales: A Guest Post by CG Drews
CG Drews has been obsessed with dark fairytales for as long as they can remember, and Don’t Let the Forest In is a culmination of everything they love about these dark and dazzling tales. Our YA Book Club pick is an unsettling journey into the macabre that will leave readers breathless (and chilled to the bone). Discover more from CG in their exclusive essay on why they wanted to write their YA debut, down below.
Hardcover $19.99
Don't Let the Forest In (Barnes & Noble YA Book Club Edition)
Don't Let the Forest In (Barnes & Noble YA Book Club Edition)
By CG Drews
Hardcover $19.99
With a lingering terror that will lurk well after you finish, this psychological horror is packed with monsters of fairytale, folklore and so much more. Good luck not getting hooked (and haunted).
With a lingering terror that will lurk well after you finish, this psychological horror is packed with monsters of fairytale, folklore and so much more. Good luck not getting hooked (and haunted).
I’ve always been obsessed with fairytales, but the beautiful, wicked kind that have teeth of thorns. As I collected slivers of ideas for Don’t Let the Forest In, I realised I wanted to fill it with the cracked edges of these kind of dark fairytales and to pepper the book with my own original tales. As Andrew says, they’re meant to feel like paper cuts. A deep part of this book is about using art to cope with life, of funnelling pain into art of macabre monsters and bloody fairytales. But what if the monsters in your head started crawling off the page? What if they came to life, vicious and lovely and horrifying, and slithered out of the forest each night? This is a story of being haunted by things you can’t face and by the time you get to the end of the book, you’ll understand why the monsters are so hungry. And the only thing that can be done to stop them.
The decision to mix my love of fairytales with the dark academia aesthetic came from my love of books like The Secret History and If We Were Villains. I’ve craved a chance to write dark academia for years and this felt like the perfect time to explore pressure-filled school environments and how often academia prioritises a demand for excellence and perfect grades at the cost of ignoring students’ mental health crises. Andrew and Thomas are two teens screaming silently for help while their prestigious, gothic school covers up their breakdowns again and again. Are there monsters in the halls and vines spilling out of the wallpaper? They’ll explain it all away. I enjoyed exploring the metaphorical aspect of this. Time to shut the books and get covered in blood instead.
Andrew is such a special character to me: he is intense and angsty and fraught with anxiety that spills across the page. His anxiety will grip you by the throat, and you won’t leave this book unscathed. He’s struggling with feelings for his best friend, Thomas, while coming to terms with his own sexuality and fear that being asexual will leave him unloved. His perspective is meant to be messy and raw, full of teenage yearning and uncertainty and mistakes. As the monsters grow stronger and the forest more wicked, Andrew and Thomas’s love becomes more cloying and obsessive and toxic. Writing Andrew was a chance to delve so deep into unreliable narration as well. I always loved reading books where you can’t quite trust the main character, where you get to the end and the twists hit and you stare at the wall feeling betrayed and horrified and obsessed with how it all fit together. I wanted to catch that feeling.
Don’t Let the Forest In is a love letter to dark and wretched fairytales and atmospheric gothic aesthetics and forest rot. But it’s also a tale of grief and yearning. It is about holding onto something you love so, so tightly that it shatters. The forest wants in—and the monsters in your head are just waking up.