Panic and Projection: A Review of Liz Moore’s The God of the Woods
by Savannah Anderson, co-editor-in-chief of abraxas
As I write this, my one-year-old is asleep in her playpen. There are dishes in the sink and piles of laundry to be put away. Soon, she’ll wake up, and our day will be filled with nonstop activity until bedtime. At this moment in my life, while the days are long but free time is very fleeting, I have turned to an old friend—the thriller genre—for comfort.
When I picked up Liz Moore’s The God of the Woods, I expected to tread a familiar path. The verdant greenery of the cover reminded me of a Baroque painting and the bubblegum-pink drips (evocative of blood?) seemed to whisper: this is girly, this is for you. I thought I knew what to expect from such a novel, but here I am—over a month later—still turning it over in my mind. And this is the brilliance of Liz Moore’s writing: she sets her reader down on a very familiar path, but this is just the stage for a deeper and more human drama.
The God of the Woods begins with a scenario that any lover of the horror or thriller genres will recognize: a missing female camper at a rural summer camp in the 1970s. We’ve been here before, whether in slasher movies from the 1980s, or the more contemporary TV shows that play with these tropes like American Horror Story: 1984. The setting is Camp Emerson, a summer camp for wealthy young boys and girls designed to cultivate and test their independence. Camp Emerson is set within the larger Van Laar Preserve, and Barbara Van Laar, the missing camper, is the only daughter of the Van Laars and heir to their fortune and property. To further entrench the reader within familiar territory, Moore introduces a classic slasher cliché: an escaped murderer who may happen to be in the area. To add another layer to the mystery, Barbara’s brother Bear went missing 14 years before when he was only eight years old.
One advantage of this familiar setting is that it heightens the reader's sense of danger, and makes it easy for Moore to execute her feats of misdirection. It’s a lesson in the power of projection and panic. And as camp director T.J. Hewitt reminds us, the word “panic” comes from Pan, the god of the woods (40). On a deeper level, it also makes the reader hyper-attuned to the non-physical danger within the novel: the young woman whose boyfriend is sometimes violent but very wealthy or the grieving mother whose husband and doctor keep her supplied with disorienting pills. Judyta, perhaps the hero of the story, is a female detective carefully navigating a male-hierarchical world; she is also building the courage to defy her father and move out of her childhood home. As a reader you fear for these women and realize that it’s not just their physical safety, but their autonomy and subjectivity that are at risk.
This concept of subjectivity reminded me of a line from Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway. While reflecting on her decision to reject the proposal of a man she loved, Clarissa explains: “But with Peter everything had to be shared; everything gone into” (8). She chooses to marry another man in order to preserve the sanctity of her inner world, to do otherwise might destroy them both. Moore chooses a similar path for her characters. Like Penelope at her loom, she weaves together their narrative threads for a brief moment at Camp Emerson, before pulling them apart and sending characters back to their normal lives, unharmed but surely changed. As characters fade away from the investigation, perhaps never learning the truth of what occurred, they are able to retain their own narratives. The story belongs to each of them.
On the same page of Mrs. Dalloway, after Clarissa’s remembrances of her youthful relationship to Peter and the rationality behind severing their bond, comes one of my favorite lines from the novel.
She had a perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day. (8)
While the investigations into the Van Laar children are always central to the plot, I think this is what The God of the Woods is really about: the everyday dangers of living.
Works Cited:
Moore, Liz. The God of the Woods. New York: Riverhead Books, 2024. Print.
Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway. 1925. San Diego: Harcourt, Inc., 1981. Print.
