Queer Dark Academia Meets Monster Horror
Don’t Let the Forest In is a Queer YA forest rot romance set against the backdrop of an elitist private school in the forested hills of Virginia. At Wickwood, the students are preppy, the teachers are eclectic, and the forest is alive with the rattling rasp of monsters.
Andrew does not fit in. He has never fit in. But with his best friend (and roommate)Thomas Rye at his side, and his twin sister Dove rounding out the sharp edges of their prickling personalities, school is almost tolerable.
Don’t Let the Forest In, 2024
Andrew expects his senior year to be the same as every other year. Dove will edit all his essays in bright purple ink. Thomas will illustrate each of Andrew’s darkly toxic fairytales with hauntingly malevolent creatures. And the golden boy, Bryce Kane, will continue to bully Andrew for panicking at the slightest prank, for clinging to his sister’s side like a spineless sapling wilting beneath the glare of her academic excellence. But that was before Thomas’s parents went missing. Before he turned up on the first day of school with blood on his sleeve and police on his tail. Before the monsters started seeping from the shadows, slipping from the dark, breathing down Thomas’s neck with mouths of splintered wood and eyes of maggot-filled pitch, yearning, hungering, to devour the artist who made them. There is no monster or man Andrew would not kill to protect this boy of paint-smudged smiles from harm. But as sleepless nights of monster hunting turn into restless days of dream-starved anxiety, Andrew begins to worry that the monster in need of killing… is the very boy he would wet his hands in blood to save.
Dripping with darkly rich visual imagery and prose that blossoms from every page, Don’t Let the Forest In is every dark academia, monster lover’s dream. This novel is unique in its inclusion of an asexual main character, and CG Drews does not shy away from exploring the fear of being unlovable in a world where sex is standard and anything less is viewed as half a love. The characters are distinctly their own in style and tone, encompassing a broad range of ethnic backgrounds and sexual orientations. Blending mystery, body horror, and queer romance into a tapestry of macabre beauty, this novel will trail inky fingertips through your mind, leaving dark thumbprints on your thoughts long after the last line has stopped ringing in your ears.
