Tag: Supernatural Fiction

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.