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Beauty and Peril: A Guest Post by Liz Moore

By Liz Moore / July 16, 2024 at 1:42 am

Our July Book Club pick, The God of the Woods, is the kind of story you’ll want to tell all your friends about. Read on for an exclusive essay from author Liz Moore on the inspiration for this immersive novel.

Hardcover $30.00

The God of the Woods (Barnes & Noble Book Club Edition)

By Liz Moore

Hardcover $30.00

The woods can’t hide everything — the family dynamics of Succession meets the intrigue of Liane Moriarty in this story of money and land, legacy and inheritance.

Anyone who has spent time in the deep woods knows the feeling that settles on a person who’s willing to be quiet for a while. Go still for long enough, and the forest forgets you’re there. For some, this sensation is peaceful, even transcendent. For others, being profoundly disconnected from human civilization induces panic.

This tension between beauty and peril in nature is one of the themes of my novel The God of the Woods, inspired as much by my personal experience of a specific place as by some of the true stories told about it.

The specific place in question: the Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York.

In the early 1800s, four of my ancestors moved from other parts of the Northeastern United States to a small community in the southern Adirondacks. There, for three more generations, they tried to create profitable family farms—a battle they presumably lost to the rocky Adirondack terrain. Because by the early 1900s, they had settled in towns just south of the Adirondacks, where my grandmother and mother were born and raised.

But some ancestral memory remained, because in the 1960s, my grandparents built by hand a home on a reservoir not far from the site of those original settlers. I’ve been spending summers there since I was a child; today, I bring my own children there to visit my parents, who live in the cabin for part of the year.

The region is a place of fascinating history and also tragedy. My inspiration for The God of the Woods came from the stories I’ve been hearing since birth of dynastic American families who underwent great tragedies at summer residences in the region; of crimes, including those perpetrated by the real-life serial killer Robert Garrow, who loosely inspired a secondary character in the book; and of the Adirondack Park itself, founded in the hopes of preserving some of the most beautiful land in the United States, but victim, as natural resources usually are, to the conflicting interests of those who wield most of the nation’s power and capital.

While writing The God of the Woods, I aimed to tell a propulsive story about multiple generations of multiple families, rich and poor, in the Adirondack Mountains I know and love. I hope you enjoy it.