• Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
FanFiAddict

FanFiAddict

A gaggle of nerds talking about Fantasy, Science Fiction, and everything in-between. They also occasionally write reviews about said books. 2x Stabby Award-Nominated and home to the Stabby Award-Winning TBRCon.

  • Home
  • About
    • Reviewers
    • Review Policy
    • Stance on AI
    • Contact
    • Friends of FFA
  • Blog
    • Reviews
      • Children’s / Middle Grade Books
      • Comics / Graphic Novels
      • Fantasy
        • Alt History
        • Epic Fantasy
        • Fairy Tales
        • Grimdark
        • Heroic Fantasy
        • LitRPG
        • Paranormal Fantasy
        • Romantic Fantasy
        • Steampunk
        • Superheroes
        • Sword and Sorcery
        • Urban Fantasy
      • Fear For All
        • Demons
        • Ghosts
        • Gothic
        • Lovecraftian
        • Monsters
        • Occult
        • Psychological
        • Slasher
        • Vampires
        • Werewolves
        • Witches
        • Zombies
      • Fiction
      • Science Fiction
        • Aliens
        • Artificial Intelligence
        • Alt History
        • Cyberpunk
        • Dystopian
        • Hard SciFi
        • Mechs/Robots
        • Military SF
        • Space Opera
        • Steampunk
        • Time Travel
      • Thriller
    • Neurodivergence in Fiction
    • Interviews
      • Book Tube
      • Authorly Writing Advice
  • SFF Addicts
    • SFF Addicts Clips
    • SFF Addicts (Episode Archive)
  • TBRCon
    • TBRCon2025
    • TBRCon2024
    • TBRCon2023
    • TBRCon2022
  • FFA Book Club
  • FFA TBR Toppers
    • Advertise Your Book on FFA!
  • Writer Resources
    • Artists
    • Cartographers
    • Editing/Formatting/Proofing

Review: Whisperwood by Alex Woodroe

August 24, 2023 by Ed Crocker 2 Comments

Rating: 9/10

If you go down to the woods today… you’re in for a fairly terminal surprise

Synopsis

When curious nomad Anna hears about Whisperwood, a town that’s not on any maps, that nobody goes to, and nobody comes from, she sees an opportunity to hide from her violent witch-hunting ex.

But not everything is peaceful in the isolated community. A vanishing town, a gruesome funeral rite, an emergency field surgery—these surprises and more test Anna’s resolve.

Prevented from leaving the frontier settlement by folk magic she doesn’t understand, Anna lends helping hands everywhere she can, but quickly finds that investigating the forest too closely could end up being the last thing she does.

Review

Some books should be described as little as possible, so as not to spoil the wild wonders within. So it is with Whisperwood by Alex Woodroe, a blend of dark fairytale, Grimm folklore (Grimm/Grim in both senses of the word), Romanian folklore and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but ultimately something completely new and fresh, which takes you in constantly unexpected directions like a corkscrew rollercoaster.

I’ll do my best, then, to not give anything away but if I fail, dear reader, know that my ultimate sin was enthusiasm.

So what can we say? Anna, fleeing from an abusive ex, arrives at a strange medieval town in the woods, hoping for a new start. Once she’s there, she finds she can’t leave. And there are things in the woods, things that the whole structure of the town is build towards understanding and staying safe from.

There… I think that’s it. It’s a gloriously mysterious start, and much of the opening chapters are based around the reader’s desperate desire to find out what is in those woods. Vague descriptions of things and phenomena are bandied around, and Woodroe builds this to fever pitch, until eventually I began paraphrasing the famous Brad Pitt scream at the end of the film Seven: “What’s in the woods? What’s in the woods??!!”

When we do get clues or insights into the horrors that lie within the woods, you’re left with the sense of Stephen King’s The Mist: lovecraftian things, unknowable. Woodroe doubles down on the gore at times, especially in one memorable early encounter, and it’s beautiful to see, used sparingly but nauseously. But Woodroe also builds a surreal element into this as well, so we’re not just talking about potential monsters but entire physical planes of existence that defy the laws of time and…. Oh, there I go again. Almost spoiling things.

While we’re waiting for our true journey into the woods, the great thrill of this book is the town itself. This is a place where the citizens have spent decades trying to gain knowledge about the woods, and the town has an intriguing structure built around this. Anna is thrown into old grudges and rivals and the classic tale of the new kids versus the old guard, and there is almost that sense of a revolution on the cusp, which creates a nice juicy thematic vibe of “what’s worse, the people or the monsters outside?”

Another thing that demonstrates the originality of this book is how Woodroe subverts the standard horror convention of “here’s a big infodump about the monsters we’re facing”. The fact is, we get A LOT of information about the woods – careless readers will need to keep up – but the genius twist to this is that a lot of it is… unreliable at best, because ultimately the town don’t really know what they’re dealing with. They are so out of their depth they may as well be in the Mariana Trench, even though they are swimming in so-called knowledge. This gives the town sections an intriguing sense of unreliability, of constantly doubting what we’re told. It’s a clever twist on the standard horror narrative.

But when, finally, we get access to those woods… Woodroe loves her gruesome, and gruesome you get, but you also get a strange sense of the surreal, the magical, the folklore-esque. My knowledge of Romanian folklore is shamefully limited, but even I got a strong sense of the influences she’s pulling from here. I mentioned both The Mist and A Midsummer Night’s Dream earlier, which might seem like strange bedfellows, but trust me, this is the best way to describe these unique, surrealist sections. Chilling gore and horror goes alongside… well it’s best you find out yourself.

Then there are the final sections, when woods and town finally combine, which take the reader on one final corkscrew turn of the narrative. What Woodroe does with this may not please everyone, but for me it was absolutely fascinating and, in a strange way, gloriously triumphant.

The final thing to say is on the characters themselves. While they take a while to become vivid, by the end the small cast of Anna’s friends become fully fleshed out, and Woodroe makes sure to insert some poignant character development in between the woods mayhem. My favourite character arc was that of gruff, roguish but likeable blacksmith Rares, who goes on… quite the journey, but everyone faces their own demons in one sense or another and I felt for all of them. Anna herself is a fascinating character, simultaneously brave and haunted… her terrible past is not revealed for a long time, but it’s worth the wait, and the conclusion to her story feels hard-earned and satisfying.  

Overall, Whisperwood is audaciously, chillingly original, and gives you that rare feeling as a reader of being in genuinely uncharted territory… debuts don’t come much creepier or creative than this.

Filed Under: Fear For All, Lovecraftian, Monsters, Occult, Reviews Tagged With: Fear for all, Folklore, Horror, Review

About Ed Crocker

Ed Crocker was born in Manchester, UK and has managed to stay there ever since. By day he edits books—his clients include Sunday Times Bestselling authors, award-winning indie authors, and acclaimed small presses. By night, or sometimes also by day (freelancer rules), he reviews books and interviews authors, watches horror films, plays video games and writes fantasy and horror novels. My god, what a nerd.

His epic fantasy trilogy The Everlands – vampires, werewolves and sorcerers but no humans - is being published in North America by St Martin's Press. The first book, Lightfall, is out Jan 14, 2025.

You can find him on most socials (not Twitter) at @edcrockerbooks and at ed-crocker.com, where you can sign up for his newsletter GET CROCKED for your sins.

Other Reviews You Might Like

World of Warcraft: The Voices Within Short Story Collection Cover

Review: World of Warcraft: The Voices Within Short Story Collection

I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman

Review: I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman

Review: Vampire Metropolis by Robin Brown

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Erica Robyn says

    August 26, 2023 at 9:14 am

    I need to read this one soon! This sounds amazing!

    Reply
    • Ed Crocker says

      August 26, 2023 at 9:41 am

      Hope you like it as much as I did!

      Reply

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Primary Sidebar

Sponsored By

Use Discount Code FANFI For 5% Off!

FFA Newsletter!

Sign up for updates and get FREE stories from Michael R. Fletcher and Richard Ford!

What Would You Like To See?(Required)
Please select the type of content you want to receive from FanFi Addict. You can even mix and match if you want!

FFA Author Hub

Read A.J. Calvin
Read Andy Peloquin
Read C.J. Daily
Read C.M. Caplan
Read D.A. Smith
Read DB Rook
Read Francisca Liliana
Read Frasier Armitage
Read Josh Hanson
Read Krystle Matar
Read M.J. Kuhn

Recent Reviews

World of Warcraft: The Voices Within Short Story Collection Cover
I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman

Recent Comments

  1. Mark Matthews on COVER REVEAL: To Those Willing to Drown by Mark MatthewsJanuary 7, 2025
  2. Basra Myeba on Worth reading Jack Reacher books by Lee Child?January 5, 2025
  3. Ali on Review: Sleeping Worlds Have No Memory by Yaroslav BarsukovJanuary 5, 2025
  4. Carter on So you want to start reading Warhammer 40,000? Here’s where to start!January 4, 2025
  5. M. Zaugg on Bender’s Best LitRPG reads of 2024January 3, 2025

Archive

Copyright © 2025 · Powered by ModFarm Sites · Log In