After
reading In
the Heart of the Dark Wood by Billy Coffey, I almost fell into the
mistake of thinking it was just another great story by a favorite writer, a
sequel to another great story, The
Devil Walks in Mattingly. And it is both a great story and a sequel, but
that’s not all it is.
It
took several days of thinking about it before I realized what this novel
actually is.
It’s
been two years since the great tornado destroyed most of the town of Mattingly.
All of dead have been accounted for, except one – Mary Granderson, mother to
Allie. Her body has never been found; what lies in her grave is the only thing
that could be found – her pink tennis shoe. Allie had turned inward, becoming almost
a different person. Her father has turned to the bottle.
Allie
believes her mother is still alive. She discovers one morning, a few days
before Christmas, that the Mary of the nativity set in the front yard is
missing. She believes her father has taken it. She has to find it, and she has
to find her mother. The little toy compass that her mother had given her the
day of the storm suddenly starts working again. And Allie believes it is
pointing to her mother.
She
enlists her friend Zach Barnett, the son of the sheriff (a main character in The Devil Walks in Mattingly), to help
locate the missing Nativity figure. And off they go, biking toward where the compass
is telling Allie to go, toward the great woods. She doesn’t tell Zach what the
real object of their search actually is. They enter the woods, and they will
not return for four days.
Coffey
is a master at building and sustaining the tension of the story, knowing there
has to be breaks (or else the reader might collapse). But the focus is Allie
and Zach, accompanied by Allie’s dog, and the reader soon learns they are
walking into a place of evil – and that they are being hunted, and herded.
It
would be easy to consider In the Heart of the Dark Wood as a well-written,
engaging suspense story. But the idea of the dark woods, and the evil that
lurked within in, suggest this story is something else. Haunted by the images
and descriptions of the woods, I spent time thinking about what they
represented.
 |
| Billy Coffey |
It
was the characters of two children on the cusp of their teen years that finally
led me to a conclusion. The woods, those dark and forbidding woods hiding evil
and danger, are allegorical. One can read the story, in fact, as an allegory –
an allegory of the dark places that exist within each of us, the battle that
goes one between innocence and darkness, a battle that leads one to a kind of
internal confrontation, the confrontation with self. For that’s what both Zach
and Allie ultimately have to confront – the confrontation within themselves,
the confession that they must make to themselves about who they are and what they
are and aren’t capable of doing.
It’s
more than recognizable. The story of Allie and Zach is the story of each of us,
knowing that we have to come to grips with failure, with falling short, that we
will not measure up by depending upon ourselves.
Coffey
is moving his prodigious storytelling abilities to another level. Read In the Heart of the Dark Wood, and you’ll
discover it.
Photograph by Tim Emerich via Public
Domain Pictures. Used with permission.
