![]() Horrific images stab into her brain: "I am running through moonlit woods, with branches ripping at my clothes and my feet catching in the snow-bowed bracken." She recalls a road, the roar of a car engine, headlamps. Close upon the heels of that thought comes another one: "What have I done?" She sees uniformed policemen stationed outside her room. Worse than her physical state, she is afflicted by memory loss and a nagging sense of guilt. In a Dark, Dark Wood opens in a hospital room, where a young woman wakes with contusions, scratches and a woeful head injury. No cell service, of course, and no neighbors, with a long, rutted, unpaved driveway between the hens and civilization. The titular woods, so striking by day, turn blank and threatening when the sun goes down. In the U.S., women celebrating an impending wedding might be more likely to party with Magic Mike, but the bachelorette bash in Ware's book takes place in a modernist glass house in the English countryside. That one of the main characters here is nicknamed "Flopsy" doesn't help things along any. Like so many phrases that describe all-female gatherings, such as quilting bee or kaffeeklatsch, that hen business has a slight cluck of the patronizing to it. I am slightly embarrassed to admit I had never before encountered the term "hen party" before reading Ruth Ware's suspenseful debut novel In a Dark, Dark Wood. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. When she gets in bed, she laughs and says "There's no one in this room but me" and a scary voice from nowhere says "AND ME!".Ī short limerick style poem about a skeleton.Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title In a Dark, Dark Wood Author Ruth Ware She goes to bed that night, and checks everywhere and finds nothing. Ruth boldly claims that she does not believe in ghosts and she is not afraid. Ruth goes to visit her relatives and is playing with her cousin Susan when Susan tells her a pirate once lived in the room Ruth is staying in. The final object in the series, a dark, dark box, is suddenly revealed to contain a ghost. This story is presented as a series of "dark, dark" places and objects which narrow in scope from a woods to a house within the woods to a room within the house and so on. ![]() The man apologizes and goes to visit Jim's grave, where he finds his sweater. When the driver returns for his sweater the next day and knocks on the door, a woman in the home says that Jim was her son, but that he had died almost a year ago. The child, Jim, is visibly shivering in his car, so the man gives him a sweater to put on, dropping him off safely with the sweater. ![]() She is surprised when the corpses spring to life to respond in the affirmative.Ī man is driving in the rain at night when he sees a small boy alone in the rain and offers the child a ride home. The kid once again runs away, encountering a third man with yet longer teeth and finally running all the way home.Ī "very short and very fat" woman asks three corpses in a graveyard if she will be thin like them when she is dead. He runs and comes upon another man, who asks him why he is running before revealing that he has even longer teeth. The kid asks the man for the time, and when he replies, the kid sees he has long teeth, scaring him away. "The Teeth" Ī kid is hurrying home and comes upon a man. "The Green Ribbon" is derived from a French story of unknown origin, which was popularized by Washington Irving's 1824 short story " The Adventure of the German Student". After reaching old age, Jenny lets Alfred untie the ribbon while she is on her deathbed, causing her head to fall onto the floor and supposedly die. ![]() Jenny always says she's just waiting for the right time. She refuses to reveal to Alfred why she wears the ribbon, despite his pleading, and even when the two are wed, she wears the ribbon every day. She always wears a green ribbon around her neck and meets a boy named Alfred. The third story in the book, "The Green Ribbon", follows a girl named Jenny.
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