A Dark and Wild Wood by Sarah Nicole Lemon is a haunting gothic fantasy about the illusion of male power

In A Dark and Wild Wood, women survive by making themselves smaller for men who were never as powerful as they seemed in the first place. Inspired by the Bluebeard fairy tale, A Dark and Wild Wood is a lush, gothic historical fantasy drenched in ghostly visions, dark magic, and decaying beauty. The novel follows Salomé, a young woman cursed—or perhaps gifted—with the ability to see spirits. After witnessing her foster mother burned as a witch, she and her beloved sister Rochelle are sent to live in a convent, where silence, obedience, and repression become the conditions of survival. But the convent is only the first prison Salomé inhabits.

When Rochelle vanishes, Salomé eventually escapes and spends five years working in a brothel, surviving at the whims of the men around her while continuing to hide her supernatural abilities for fear of suffering the same fate as her foster mother. The novel smartly presents the convent and the brothel as two versions of the same confinement. One is built around religious authority, the other around male desire, but both demand submission and self-erasure from women in exchange for survival.

That tension finally explodes when a client refuses to pay Salomé. Her rage overwhelms her control, and the confrontation leaves her buried in a grave.

Her escape from that grave becomes one of the novel’s most powerful symbolic moments. Crawling out of the earth and wandering into the Black Forest feels less like travel than resurrection. It is only after this figurative death that Salomé crosses into the true fairy-tale world of the novel and arrives at the shifting manor of Lord Death himself.

Rather than claiming her life, Lord Death offers her a bargain: become his apprentice, live within his strange castle of locked rooms and impossible corridors, and learn to harness the magic she has spent her life suppressing. But the deeper Salomé falls under his influence, the more she begins to recognize a truth that gives the novel its emotional and thematic core: men often possess only the power women feed into them.

Lord Death initially appears seductive, omniscient, and terrifyingly powerful, but Lemon gradually strips away that illusion. Salomé begins to understand that much of his strength depends upon her devotion, her labor, her magic, and her belief in him. The dynamic mirrors the structures that shaped her entire life. Whether in the convent, the brothel, or Lord Death’s manor, men and patriarchal systems continuously position themselves as all-powerful while quietly drawing their strength from the women sustaining them.

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What makes Salomé’s journey satisfying is not simply that she fights back, but that she learns to see clearly. The horror of the novel becomes psychological as much as supernatural: realizing the godlike figures controlling your life are, beneath the performance, weak, needy, and often pathetic. By the time Salomé begins reclaiming her own power, the novel transforms from gothic fantasy into something sharper and more subversive.

The writing itself is intensely lush and atmospheric. Roshani Chokshi calling Lemon “a poet with knives for teeth” is an especially fitting description. The prose luxuriates in mood, texture, and imagery, wrapping readers in candle smoke, damp forests, crumbling stone, blood, velvet, and shadows. Readers who enjoy immersive, descriptive fantasy will likely find themselves completely absorbed in the world Lemon creates.

The novel also works remarkably well as a Hero’s Journey story. In literary terms, the Hero’s Journey refers to a narrative structure in which a protagonist leaves behind an ordinary world, crosses into an unfamiliar and dangerous realm, undergoes trials and transformation, and ultimately emerges changed. Salomé’s story follows this structure beautifully. Her symbolic death in the grave marks the threshold into the supernatural world of the Black Forest, while her time in Lord Death’s manor becomes a process of painful awakening, self-discovery, and confrontation with the forces controlling her life.

More than anything, A Dark and Wild Wood understands what many fairy tales have always secretly been about: power, survival, and the moment someone realizes they no longer need to kneel before false gods.

What are some of your favorite gothic fantasy novels or fairy-tale retellings? Let me know in the comments.

A Dark and Wild Wood releases May 26, 2026. An advance reader copy of this book (ARC) was provided to me by the publisher via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

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