Don’t Go Into The Woods: Terrifying Books Set in The Wilderness

The Woods is a powerful mystery thriller about the complexities of memory. Tess remembers a lot of things from her childhood that she desperately wishes she could forget. But all those bad memories are nothing compared to the one thing she can't remember: the night her sister died in the woods near their childhood home. Tess was the only witness to what was eventually deemed an accident. Years later, having resolved to put the trauma behind her, Tess gets a sudden call from her father. She returns to the woods where her sister's body was found to confront the memories she thought she'd lost forever.

Going into the woods and coming out without any memories of what happened is also the theme of Imaginary Friend. Seven-year-old Christopher is settling into life in a new town with his single mother. Then one day he vanishes into the woods. Six days later, he returns, seemingly unharmed. But now he can hear a voice no one else can, and he's obsessed with completing a mission only he understands, convinced that if he doesn't succeed, everyone in town will be in grave danger. This is a literary page-turner that will keep you guessing till the very end.

Related: Six Thrillers With Supernatural Elements

Sometimes the woods hide dark and dangerous secrets. In The Children of Red Peak, three childhood friends confront the traumas of their past. As children, they witnessed the terrifying last days of a religious cult on the remote mountain of Red Peak. Years later, after a fellow survivor dies by suicide, the three friends finally reunite. As they share their stories and long-buried memories, they're forced to confront the truth, which takes them back to Red Peak, and the dangerous secrets the mountain still holds.

Related: Fictional Cults as Terrifying as the Real Thing

In The Boy From the Woods, a man with a mysterious past teams up with a TV criminal attorney to find a missing teenager. When Naomi, a girl who was constantly bullied at school, disappears, no one seems to care. Except for Wilde, who was found in the woods as a child with no memory of his past. Now, as an adult, he can't ignore a fellow outcast in need. But as he sets out in search of Naomi, he's forced to confront his own past, which contains secrets that could destroy both his life and Naomi's.

Once upon a time there was and there wasn’t a woman who went to the woods.” In this horror story set in colonial New England, a law-abiding Puritan woman goes missing. Or perhaps she has fled or abandoned her family. Or perhaps she’s been kidnapped, and set loose to wander in the dense woods of the north. Alone and possibly lost, she meets another woman in the forest. Then everything changes.
On a journey that will take her through dark woods full of almost-human wolves, through a deep well wet with the screams of men, and on a living ship made of human bones, our heroine may find that the evil she flees has been inside her all along.

The body of an unidentified woman has been discovered in a remote forest. A large, unique scar on one side of her face should make the identification easy, but nobody has reported her missing. Louise Rick, the new commander of the Missing Persons Department, waits four long days before pulling off a risky move: releasing a photo of the victim to the media, jeopardizing the integrity of the investigation in hopes of finding anyone who knew her.
The gamble pays off when a woman recognizes the victim as Lisemette, a child she cared for in the state mental institution many years ago. Lisemette was a "forgotten girl", abandoned by her family and left behind in the institution. But Louise soon discovers something even more disturbing: Lisemette had a twin, and both girls were issued death certificates more than thirty years ago.