Mia’s Shrine of Scary Stories, #1, 2025

Goddess of the aphotic and abyss, tenebrific umbral queen of the night, I am positively giddy with gothic glee. October 1st!

YAY

Let me begin scaring the living daylights out of you with a very “me”-horror story by one of my favourite finds as an author this last year: Courtney Gould.

So far, everything I have read by her has revealed an, in my humble opinion, extremely fine touch, when it comes to portraying queer long-term as well as budding relationships. But what I appreciate most are her lesbian characters and love stories, and how cunningly she weaves her characters' struggles with mental illness and trauma into fantastic and chilling tales.

Now, how many of you are scared to be outside in the woods at night? The Austrian author Michael Köhlmeier, in his retelling of Greek myths, traces the etymological root of the word 'panic' back to the god Pan, linking the fear of the woods to the fear of the untamed, wild, uncontrollable deity. I often think of that. As someone who has worked in the woods in the pitch-dark of night many, many times, let me ask you again:

Aren't you, just a little bit, feeling the shivers race down your neck, when you think of how little you could see in a forest in the night, just the minuscule fragment of your surroundings a torch is able to pick out, or the light of your headlamp, or maybe only the light on your phone? What a meagre, squalid bit of monochrome in all the darkness and the strange creaking and rustling around you. And then, what about the huge, looming silence behind it that feels like a living thing? Waiting for you? This is Pan's domain. And he is waiting with all his creatures. Waiting to get you and sink his wild hands into your hair and fill your ears with his wild, wild laughter of Dionysian madness. And while he can be a guardian god of shepherds, I’ve always favoured the view that what he needs to guard these days are the wilds, and what he is guarding them from is human incursion. He is one of a range of particularly unruly deities associated with the wild untamed nature in and around us. (Side note: I am no academic scholar of Hellenistic myths, cults, or the mysteries, but if you want to fall down into a particularly interesting rabbit hole, I encourage you to read up on Pan and then the cult of Cybele...and you will perhaps feel even more disturbed out there, in the dark.) To be afraid in the woods at night is a wise and healthy thing to be. It prepares your body to run faster.

And it is definitely raw panic, in the sense of fear of the woods and what may lurk in them, which infuses “What the Woods Took” by Courtney Gould.

Think back on when you were a teenager. (Or maybe you still are one.) Your so-called family is no safe place, neither is your home, which is likewise actually no home at all. You are woken up at some point during the night and taken from a place that may not be home but at least was familiar, by strangers, simply snatched, with your foster parents or uncaring blood relatives standing by, as if you were a criminal, or not even human at all, a thing to be moved and discarded, unless it tries to turn this act of kidnapping into one final chance. It's going to be good for you, they tell you. And so, you and a bunch of other scared kids on the cusp of adulthood, who don't perform or function to the expectations of their guardians or families, are dragged into the back of beyond for some allegedly much-needed, character-building, dubious behavioural therapy boot camp.

Last Chance Saloon.

This is what happens to Devin Green. She has no blood relatives to care for her, has been shunted through a system of foster homes, she has poor impulse control and really bad anger management, and her violent streak has gotten her into such deep water she is between this camp and juvie. The other four kids in her group seem all just as much condemned and given up even before they have had a chance to really grow up. There is a goody-two-shoes seeming girl, Hannah, who must have done something unimaginably shocking because her disappointed father sent her cross-adorned neck out here into the wilderness with a group of rough, rough kids. There is the heiress-seeming type who couldn't care less about literally anything or anyone and is about ready to step on everyone in her way to get what she wants, whatever that may be, and she matches Devin's violence with an almost sadistic temperament. Sheridan, lavender hair, cruel as the day is long. It does not take long for these two to clash epically. There is Ollie, whose father has apparently simply given up on him. Aidan, who is almost a child still.

Five kids, two counsellors, “Coach Ethan” and “Coach Liv” of dubitable credentials and barely older than teenagers themselves, and a fifty day hike in a programme called REVIVE, of all things, with a set of challenges for them to overcome by working as a team, so as they will mend their ways. What could go wrong, right?

First, it seems plausible to expect that Devin may simply murder Sheridan. Devin is trying to defend weaker group members from Sheridan's psychological terror, and is outraged that her chivalry is not met with approval by the coaches, nor even by her other team members, but rather stern reprimands and reminders that this tendency to act like a vigilante is what got her here in the first place. But Sheridan sabotaging what is already a difficult and demanding experience for everyone, and endangering the tentative rapport and even a foundation of trust and camaraderie Devin manages to create with Ollie, is not the worst that can happen to Devin. Not by a long, long shot. Not even when Ollie almost drowns due to Sheridan’s selfishness during their first challenge, ‘milestone’ in programme speak, crossing a river without aid by working as a group. This dawns on the teenagers the morning they wake up to a camp site sans coaches, breakfast, or fire, with no idea what to do to arrive their next food drop site. Is this part of the programme? Can Devin use this opportunity to escape, like she has wanted to do all along? Can Ollie rely on Devin’s support and restraint as he tries to keep the peace in the panicking group?

They find loose packets of food. They find a backpack with Ethan’s notes and wallet. They decide to try and reach the next drop site with their limited set of skills, they try to read the hardly informative maps, with their odd blank places, left behind by the coaches. Devin is sure the blanks mean human infrastructure and that this isn’t a test, but that they are in actual danger. Aidan is sure the trail is the only sure way out of their misery. And Ollie and the rest agree: If only they manage to stick to the path and finish all the other challenges until they reach milestone five, they will have a way out. And that this is the only sure thing. Even Ollie seems to turn from Devin, betray what little trust they managed to build. Only Sheridan, of all people, agrees with Devin. And Sheridan is the only one with experience in behaviour therapy programmes like this, and one of only two of them (the other being Aidan, it seems) who can actually read a map and calculate their walking distance. There appears to be a structure out there, a human structure, if one can rely on the map. Devin cannot resist her chance at an escape from the woods, the programme, regardless of what the structure might be. Fraught, the group splits up: Hannah, Aidan and Ollie will follow the trail, and Devin and Sheridan will explore the structure. If they find help there, they will catch up with the group. And if not...Ollie is sure, they will die in the unknown forest, with whatever may have gotten the coaches still out there. But there is no stopping Devin, or making her see that his concerns stem from care for her and a cooler head, and not betrayal of their nascent friendship. They vote on it. Hannah is casting her vote for Devin and Sheridan to go. Sheridan ties her vote to the condition that she is coming too, so Devin cannot leave her behind. Only Aidan and Ollie advocate for the group to stay together. Devin gets what she wants – with the downside, that Sheridan is coming with her.

After two days, during which Devin learns Sheridan has taken more than a necessary share of the rations from Ollie’s group, her and Sheridan arrive at the structure on the map. And yes, once, it was a human structure. But now...it is only a long-ruined cabin, which seems to have burnt down. Nothing and no-one is here. Nothing to help them. Nothing at all.

They fight, about the stolen rations, about everything, they fight because they both are who they are, oil and water, and because they are unbearable to each other, and they have to make camp at the ruin. Night falls. Devin wakes up, as if pulled by something out in the woods. She sees...she sees a monster, higher than the treetops, of distorted and disturbing human proportions, with the face of her worst nightmare, and it knows her, and seeing it, she is reliving the horrible, terrifying things that happened to her. It is hunting her. It calls her by name. She runs. Runs and runs, until she falls. Looses consciousness with the tread of her pursuer in her ears.

In the morning, she finds herself back at in her sleeping bag at the ruin, convincing herself she has had a nightmare. Sheridan has found a notebook in the ruin, and seems (to Devin) suspiciously reluctant to share the news. And then, Sheridan asks her where she went during the night. Devin clamps down on her disquiet. Hard. After all, even if she did step out and has fuzzy memories, that does not prove anything. Right? Monsters aren’t real. She would much rather focus on why Sheridan is not more forthcoming about a journal that could contain an answer as to how they could get out of here. They manage, for the first time, to find common ground as they argue over the journal. And eventually they, defeated and without any other option, go to rejoin Ollie and the others on the trail. Not bringing help, but maybe, having found something like a truce, like cooperation.

But Devin is not the only one who has visions of the person responsible for the most horrible experience in her entire life. They have a plethora of bad memories between the five of them, five neglected, mistreated, abandoned young human beings. And then, Coach Liv reappears. Covered in blood.

As the woods begin to reveal their terrifying, strange secret as the teenagers one after the other literally fall prey to their worst fears, Sheridan turns from her worst enemy to the person Devin will have to be able to count on most – if any of them are to make it out of the woods at all.

(Now you are prepped, go, and read the book or listen to the audiobook, in which Lindsey Dorcas as a narrator will make your hair stand on end. And whom you will, among other names, meet again, if you keep following this blog, and enjoy sapphic romance fiction, sapphic horror, and other such wonderful concoctions. And then I’ll tell you why I think so highly of this book, in a more meta kind of way. But first, go, and get scared six ways from Sunday by this tale. I can quite assuredly promise you: You will be.)