THE BUTCHER OF THE FOREST, Premee Mohamed's body horror/dark fantasy novella

THE BUTCHER OF THE FOREST
PREMEE MOHAMED
Tordotcom Publishing
$18.99 trade paper, available tomorrow

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A world-weary woman races against the clock to rescue the children of a wrathful tyrant from a dangerous, otherworldly forest.

At the northern edge of a land ruled by a monstrous, foreign tyrant lies the wild forest known as the Elmever. The villagers know better than to let their children go near—once someone goes in, they never come back out.

No one knows the strange and terrifying traps of the Elmever better than Veris Thorn, the only person to ever rescue a child from the forest many years ago. When the Tyrant’s two young children go missing, Veris is commanded to enter the forest once more and bring them home safe. If Veris fails, the Tyrant will kill her; if she remains in the forest for longer than a day, she will be trapped forevermore.

So Veris will travel deep into the Elmever to face traps, riddles, and monsters at the behest of another monster. One misstep will cost everything.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Being one who really internalized the truism "No good deed goes unpunished" and its corollary "Never reveal how competent you are because then you will always get the job," I was all set to like this iteration of these aperçus. I am happy to say, nothing in the read convinced me otherwise.

Veris, whose shocking, likely unique ability to survive a trip into Elmever forest has landed her the unenviable and possibly lethal job of rescuing kids lost in there, is a good person. Her exploit in Elmever was not last year, or even last decade...she is solidly in her middle years now. She would also like to enter cronehood, thank you very much, and that might not happen unless she gets the stupid kids out of this haunted, evil forest. The stupid kids that belong to the local wicked overlord. The foreign, wicked overlord.

Of course this woman of middle years and possessed of close loving ties to her community of friends and family will drop everything and rush off to rescue this awful man's kids at risk of disappearing into the horrors she overcame before. You just need to ask!

And threaten everyone she loves with horrible deaths.

Thus are the stakes established. This is going to be a Quest with a difference in dramatis personae. Since Quests are about inner discovery through outer-world problem-solving, we are accustomed to seeing them feature young people. This time Verity, who has already solved the puzzle of surviving a day in accursed Elmever forest, must return to figure out the mystery of the place. The difference? A puzzle has one correct answer, a mystery has many possible solutions, varying shades of Rightness.

Part fairy tale with its lessons quietly taught, part adventure horror story with its body horror lightly sprinkled in, part cosmic horror with its universal stakes salted on...this novella packs a lot into its one-sitting length. Enough that it might repay breaking the read into two sessions.

While the ending fits with the story, and concludes the stakes satisfyingly, I do not think the usual audience for Quests will be all that pleased with this iteration of the storyverse because its stakes are...mutable. Veris faces down lots in this tight package. She makes her peace with the past, as all of us around her age must; she does the right thing by her lights, as we all hope to do in life; she learns that her life of answering puzzles and solving mysteries can not prepare her for anything to come except in habits of mind. The answers are, maddeningly, never the same.

Sound like my forties. Yours too, I wager.