When Hayden was eight her mother, Ella, disappeared in the woods near their small-town home of Promise. Not long after, Hayden was expelled from school due to an incident, and her physicist dad was fired after trying to convince his students that Nibelungs (German fairy creatures) are real.

Ten years of homeschooling and therapy later, Hayden is living her own life in Brooklyn with her friend Del when she gets a call from her parents’ lawyer. Her mum – long since declared ‘dead in absentia’ – has left her childhood home, Holland Manor, to Hayden, along with the instructions to find her gifts and to finish what Ella started.

Hayden considers herself to be very rational and attempts to write these strange instructions off as signs of her mother’s fragile mental state. But when birds start dropping out of the sky, causing hidden memories to come crashing back, she convinces herself going back to Promise, and the forest, is the only way to solve the mystery of her mum’s disappearance.

When Hayden and Del arrive in Promise and strangers greet Hayden by name, the eerie small town seems like something straight from the sci-fi–horror films the girls adore watching. The mystery surrounding the town and who, or what, Hayden is deepens.

What the Woods Keep really is like a horror film: sleepwalking figures with glazed eyes frantically digging in basements til their fingers bleed; nightmares of being hugged by your missing mother before realising its her eyeless, pointy toothed corpse; ravens appearing at your window or flooding the skies above you … This is not a book you want to read right before bed! A great supernatural story with enough genuinely creepy moments to keep you up at night. For readers 14+.

Dani Solomon is the assistant manager at Readings Kids.