https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/oct/24/in-the-house-in-the-dark-of-the-woods-by-laird-hunt-review

A woman strays from the path into a menacing fairytale world in a riddling novel set in colonial‑era New England

“Once upon a time there was and there wasn’t a woman who went to the woods … ” US author Laird Hunt’s riddling, shapeshifting novel makes full use of the fertile ambiguity of fairytale: its wide-eyed rhetorical certainty and resistance to final interpretation. Crumbs of information dropped throughout the text suggest that we are in colonial-era Puritan New England, where a woman has settled with her husband and son. “It was a great wide new world we had come to after we had left our troubles behind.”

And we are deep in the dark of the woods, along with the narrator, who ventures in hunting for berries as a treat for “my boy and my man”. She wanders, of course, from the path, and into the orbit of three other women, who might be companions, or witches, or versions of herself. There’s swashbuckling Captain Jane, who professes to help those lost in the forest; Granny Someone, whose powers are waning; and enigmatic Eliza, to whose inviting cottage our heroine finds herself constantly returning. It’s there she learns about the game of Change About: “It was such fun, said Eliza, to be first the little girl getting herself eaten, then the wolf doing the eating, then the hunter the killing … ”