The Woods Are Always Watching
The horrors of camping
Author: Perkins,Stephanie
Year first published: 2021
Original Language: English
Genre: Thriller
Grabbed randomly off the shelf while looking for something spooky for the end of october. Found this in the teens section and thought why not.
We start off following Josie and Neena, a pair of teenage best friends who have freshly graduated highschool and wanted to have one last heartfelt bonding experience before Neena left the state for college. Being near the Appalachias, the two decide to go on a little camping trip. They have never been camping before, but it shouldn’t be too hard! After all, Josie’s family were very outdoorsy, and had the supplies.
It starts off like any teen coming of age drama, having a great time and taking selfies as they hike up the mountain. But somewhere along the way, things go wrong bit by bit. Their packs are too heavy, they’re going too slow, they didn’t ration their water, they get to camp way later than they expected, and, as adolescent girls sometimes do, they begin bickering, each too stubborn to back down and come to an agreement.
They even start arguing about whether or not there are bears, when not only did Josie’s brother warn them (and even provided them with a bear canister for their food), but there were also signs in the parking lot saying that bears had been spotted.
Eventually, they begin to question whether or not they even want to continue the trip but of course they’re both too immature to admit that they’d really rather just go home and stop pretending that this friendship is going to survive the separation, let alone this one setback.
They continue, and on their way back decide to take a different path than the one they used to get here, taking a trail marked by bottlecaps nailed to trees. A solid third of the way through the book and so far we’ve only had Neena getting spooked in the middle of the night while going to the latrine, and the girls arguing more about which is more dangerous, a bear or people that would try to murder them, mostly as a way of telling the other that her reason for being scared is way less valid.
Josie eventually falls into a sinkhole, with some very graphic descriptions of her injury. Neena leaves to get help, both girls feeling guilty about how they treated the other. Eventually we see the something that’s watching.
Each girl is separately accosted by an unwashed mountain man with a rifle. Josie is approached by a large, frigtening man who leers down at her from the top of the hole, and Neena encounters a skinny man with a hunting rifle that tells her that the path she’s going is no the fastest way to the parking lot, and offers to show her the way.
Surprise surprise, they turn out to be working together, and even though Neena manages to get away and Josies gets out of the hole and they find each other again, the mountain men find them too, and cavemen style drag them off to their hideout.
There’s nothing supernatural here. Just the mundane horror that every woman has to deal with of the simple fact that most men are physically stronger and bigger. If you take an average cisgender man and an average cisgender woman, both with no combat training, then most of the time the woman is going to lose.
So that’s the monster the girls have to deal with: unwashed aggressive mountain men with rifles who aren’t hunting forest animals. And the girls almost don’t make it out, except there’s another, bigger predator that doesn’t like these awful, loud, smelly hunters.
It’s checkov’s gun, or really, checkov's bear. The aforementioned bear that Josie had been worried about and Neena had been dismissive of. Saving them from the men that Josie had been dismissive of. And then checkov's redneck hunting rifle also comes into play after that. so that was fun!
It's strange. Horror can be a huge power fantasy for the downtrodden. A stereotypical cis-male fantasy could be say, Conan the Barbarian or Rambo, whereas jodie and neena’s struggles could be seen as a female power fantasy. Maybe not the grievous injuries bit, but the tenacity, the sheer primal drive to go, to keep going, to move not just for you but for your closest friend, for all of the women in your community. A stereotypical male fantasy might be taking down the bear, but I could feel in my bones the fantasy of taking down a far more blood chilling predator.
I enjoyed the book while I was reading it but I very much did not like the ending. It’s so abrupt and gives absolutely no closure whatsoever. I get it, I just don’t like it.
Probably won’t get any more books from this author to be honest. The ending soured me on the whole thing. And the rest of the book wasn’t good enough to make up for it. Lackluster overall IMO.
Review posted 2023/12/07