The thing in the woods

About the book

Haverill expects a useful summer interlude when he agrees to replace an old acquaintance in a small Pennsylvania practice. The work should provide income, fresh air, and time away from the hospital. Instead, his arrival reveals a community whose reactions to particular people and places seem governed by anxieties he does not understand. A call to the Lessing home in the woods introduces a troubled patient and a setting that raises more questions than an ordinary examination can answer. Told retrospectively, the novel lets professional confidence encounter evidence that resists familiar categories. Its horror develops through local avoidance, suspicious injuries, and the woods themselves, while the doctor's initial dismissal of other people's fears becomes increasingly difficult to maintain.

• Reason and fear
• Isolation and secrecy
• Professional confidence

Why read it

The doctor's ordinary duties provide a convincing route into a mystery that steadily unsettles his assumptions.

English text of the 1924 Robert M. McBride edition