read by Kyle Winfield, Nathalie Emmanuel and Katie Sobey
The Killing Woods is a stunning piece of work that is spectacular
on the page – spare, economical, raw – and dramatically vivid and real as an
audiobook, performed in spine-tingling style by the very talented Kyle Winfield, Nathalie Emmanuel and Katie Sobey.
Ideally, you want to have both media: to be able to see the
text on the page and then to hear it brought to life by the actors.
The poetry of the prose is remarkable, inhabiting a shadowy world
of mystery, death, misremembered circumstances, guilt, anxiety and pain: teenaged
uncertainty, challenge, despair.
Emily’s Dad comes into the house from the wood – Darkwood –
and there is something draped across his outstretched arms.
‘It wasn’t a deer Dad was
carrying. It was a girl…Dad had done things like this when he’d been a soldier
who saved people; maybe he was being a hero again. Then I saw that this girl’s
skin was grey, blue around the lips like smudged lipstick. Her long hair was
plastered across her face, dark from the rain. I saw her green short-sleeved
shirt and the silver bangle on her arm. I wanted to sweep the wet hair from her
face, but my hand was half-raised when I stopped myself. I recognised her. I
knew this girl.’
Ashlee Parker is dead. And Emily’s Dad, a former soldier
suffering post traumatic stress disorder following the death of a civilian
during a military mission, is number one suspect: after all, he is the one who
found her; he is the one making sketches of a deer amidst the trees, with Ashlee’s face; he is the one in the abandoned Second World War bunker deep in
Darkwood.
But Emily’s Dad isn’t the only one who can’t remember what
happened that night in the woods, whose secret Game is a deeply denied and
buried memory. Damon, the murdered girl’s boyfriend, wakes up after a crazy
night filled with ‘fairy dust’, and he cannot recall the details of how he got
where he is; cannot find the dead girl’s collar – thin, shiny and pink ; cannot find
her phone.
Emily, Damon and finally Ashlee narrate the circumstances
and consequences of Ashlee’s death in a bravura performance brim-full of
threat, realisation and regret. The ending is truly startling and unexpected.
The Killing Woods is exciting, dramatic and poignant. And though aimed perhaps at the young-adult market this book will earn plaudits from anyone taking the time to listen.
The Killing Woods is exciting, dramatic and poignant. And though aimed perhaps at the young-adult market this book will earn plaudits from anyone taking the time to listen.
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