BOOK REVIEW | THE BONE DRENCHED WOODS | L.V. WOODS

BOOK DESCRIPTION

THE BONE DRENCHED WOODS BY L. V. WOODS

QUILL & CROW PUBLISHING

PUBLISHED: 11 APRIL 2025

Carve the bones. One for the gate, one for the door, two for the mantel, and three for the floor…

Hyacinth Turning knows the terrors beyond her village, the insatiable hunger of the Teeth. She listens to the sermons given by the Elders in their hare-skin masks. She watches as the heathens hang and the witches burn. They tell her to be good and quiet. But Hyacinth is neither good nor quiet.

After a series of tragic events, Hyacinth finds herself hastily wedded and sent far away from all she has ever known to a settlement at the edge of the sea. Where more than just the Teeth are hungry. Another horror swims below, leviathan shadows kept at bay by offerings of flesh and bone. 

But no sooner does Hyacinth take root in her new home do the Teeth and the Deep come to feed. Suspicion soon falls upon the outspoken Hyacinth, who spends more time with the outcasted Morgan Carroway than her own husband. The Elders want her burned, her husband wants her hanged, and a long-lost love claws at her dreams, but Hyacinth only wants one thing. A life and death of her choosing.

REVIEW

Hyacinth Turning lives in a village in the woods with her mother, father and sister. Everybody says that Hyacinth is wicked, that she is full of sin and that she will be fed to The Teeth, the monsters that live in the wood and feed on the sins of the village. 

One night, Hyacinth and her friend try to run away from the village. Except things do not turn out the way that they should. This leads to a series of tragic events and her actions have consequences that she could never, ever foresee. 

She finds herself married to an elder from another village, to his house by the sea. However, here, there is not only the old gods of the woods, but there are the abyssal gods of the sea. And they will take their vengeance.

The Bone Drenched Woods is a wonderfully atmospherical and blood drenched horror set in a pitch black puritanical world where strange monsters live in the woods and creatures hunt in the sea. The world is ruled by fear, not just of the things that haunt the woods, but of the elders that rule the villagers. No one can be trusted. One wrong word can see anyone sacrificed or strung up. 

In The Bone Drenched Woods, L. V. Woods takes the reader on a fantastically dark journey as we follow Hyacinth who refuses to follow the rules and conform to the expectations of others.