In the Woods They Wait: An eerie Southern Gothic that saves its scariest tricks for too late

There’s something in the woods, and it has been waiting for someone to notice. Carrie Lee South’s In the Woods They Wait is an atmospheric Southern Gothic horror novel about grief, guilt, missing children, and an ancient presence lurking in the woods. The slow-burn mystery kept me reading, but the rushed final act and underwhelming reveal kept the novel from reaching its full potential.

In Carrie Lee South’s In the Woods They Wait, the woods surrounding Devil’s Den State Park are more than a backdrop. They are a presence—ancient, watchful, and seemingly hungry. Fifteen years after Audrey Figg’s younger brother, Benny, disappeared from the park, she has made a life for herself among the very trees that swallowed him. As a park ranger with expertise in wilderness search and rescue, Audrey has turned her grief into a vocation, spending her days protecting hikers and searching the backcountry for the person she has never stopped hoping to find. When a young girl named Ivy disappears from the same woods, Audrey sees too many similarities to Benny’s disappearance to believe it is a coincidence.

In the Woods They Wait is an atmospheric Southern Gothic horror novel about grief, guilt, and the things that might be lurking just beyond the edges of what we understand. South creates an unsettling sense that the forest is hiding something long before Audrey—or the reader—knows exactly what that something might be.

Audrey’s connection to the park is complicated. Her brother’s disappearance has defined much of her adult life, and she carries a terrible secret about the day Benny vanished that she has never told anyone. Her decision to become a park ranger allows her to stay close to the place where he disappeared, but it also means she is constantly surrounded by reminders of what she lost. She has spent years searching for any evidence that might tell her what happened to Benny, even though there is little reason to believe she will ever find him.

Ivy’s disappearance changes everything. Audrey takes the case personally, not simply because she recognizes the pattern but because she cannot bear the possibility that another family will experience the same devastating uncertainty. As she searches for Ivy, she begins to uncover indications that the disappearances may not be the work of a person at all.

There are stories about something in these woods, although most people are reluctant to take them seriously. Corbin’s grandmother called the creatures she heard in the forest haints. When she and Corbin’s grandfather first moved to their farm near the woods, they heard strange things coming from the trees. She hung bottles in the branches to frighten the haints away, and eventually the disturbances stopped. To Corbin and Audrey, the practice seems like an old superstition—until the woods begin offering up evidence that there might have been more truth to the stories than they wanted to believe.

South does a good job of gradually building that sense of unease. Mysterious cairns begin appearing throughout the forest, even in places where they don’t seem to serve any practical purpose. Then a volunteer searching for Ivy disappears and is later found dead in the middle of a circle of the strange rock formations. Was the man stacking the rocks as markers to help searchers locate him, or did something else put them there?

Those questions are where the novel is at its strongest. South steadily introduces pieces of information that don’t quite fit together, allowing Audrey to begin connecting the stories of people who have encountered something strange in the woods. Each individual account is unsettling, but it is the accumulation of those accounts that creates the real tension. Slowly, a picture begins to emerge, and Audrey realizes that the stories she once dismissed as superstition may actually be warnings.

There is another layer of mystery surrounding Audrey’s boss, who knows considerably more about the disappearances than he has admitted. Once Audrey begins to understand what has been happening in the park, she finds herself facing something that is far more dangerous than a missing-person investigation. What began as a search for a little girl becomes a fight for Audrey’s own survival.

In many ways, In the Woods They Wait is a slow-burn horror novel. South spends a substantial amount of time establishing Audrey, her history, the park, and the mystery surrounding Benny’s disappearance before the horror takes center stage. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing. The eeriness of the earlier chapters kept me reading even when the story wasn’t particularly frightening. There is a persistent sense that something is wrong in the woods, and South is effective at keeping that feeling alive.

The problem is that when the horror finally arrives, the pacing shifts dramatically in the opposite direction.

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Once things start happening, they happen one after another with very little room to breathe. The novel goes from slowly building dread to a rapid succession of terrifying events. Instead of giving the reader time to absorb one horrifying development before moving on to the next, South often rushes directly into the next scene. The result is that the climax feels more like a strike of lightning than the culmination of a steadily intensifying storm.

That makes the ending less frightening than it could have been. Horror often depends on anticipation as much as the frightening thing itself, and In the Woods They Wait spends much of the novel building that anticipation beautifully. But when the payoff comes, it happens so quickly that there isn’t always enough time to sit with the horror alongside Audrey.

I also found that the eventual explanation for what is lurking in the woods didn’t quite live up to the expectations the story had created. The mysterious disappearances, the stories of the haints, the strange cairns, and the accumulating evidence of something ancient and unnatural all suggest a particularly disturbing revelation. What the entity ultimately turns out to be felt less frightening to me than the mystery surrounding it, and the final explanation came across as somewhat cheesy compared with the eerie atmosphere South had established throughout the novel.

Still, there is something undeniably compelling about the premise. The idea of a woman spending fifteen years searching the same forest for her missing brother, only to discover that he may have been taken by something that doesn’t follow the rules of the natural world, has all the ingredients of a great horror story. Audrey’s guilt also gives the story an emotional foundation beyond the supernatural mystery. She isn’t simply searching because she wants answers; she believes she bears some responsibility for what happened to Benny, and that guilt drives nearly everything she does.

I could easily see In the Woods They Wait being adapted into a horror film. The setting would translate beautifully to the screen, and there are plenty of images—the mysterious rock circles, the deep woods, the disappearances, and the stories of something moving among the trees—that could make for genuinely creepy cinematic moments. The challenge would be the pacing. A film adaptation would probably need to condense or eliminate some of the earlier material to get to the horror more quickly and sustain the tension once it arrives. As written, the novel takes its time getting to the point where it really wants to scare you, and then races through the scares once it gets there.

Even with those reservations, I found In the Woods They Wait an absorbing read. South creates an atmosphere that kept me turning pages because I wanted to understand what was happening in those woods and what had happened to Benny all those years ago. The mystery is effective, and the novel’s exploration of grief and guilt gives Audrey’s search genuine emotional weight.

The biggest disappointment is that the book’s atmosphere is sometimes more frightening than its actual horror. South builds an excellent sense of anticipation, but the eventual revelation and frantic final act don’t quite deliver on everything that eerie setup promises.

If you enjoy atmospheric horror, Southern Gothic stories, mysterious disappearances, and novels where the wilderness itself seems to be hiding a terrible secret, In the Woods They Wait is worth checking out when it releases on September 22, 2026.

Have you read a horror novel where the buildup was actually scarier than the final reveal? What makes a horror ending work for you—the explanation, the scares, or the mystery itself? Let me know in the comments!

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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