The Butcher of the Forest by Premee Mohamed

Source: Netgalley – Many thanks to the publisher!!
TL;DR: Dark and gloomy, but beautiful and fast paced. A dangerous ride, I definitely recommend for dark fantasy fans.

Plot: Veris is sent into the North Woods, an enchanted place, to find two lost children. It’s a dark time.
Characters: Veris is our main PoV and we stay pretty much with her, though by the end the children felt just as genuine.
Setting: Dark and atmospheric, Premee Mohamed did a great job drawing her dark and twisted forest.
Magic: Your standard dark fairy/enchantment. It was convincing and creepy. Well done.

Thoughts:

The Butcher of the Forest was a near perfect dark fantasy novella for me. We follow Veris, a simple village girl as she’s forced by the king to enter the dark and enchanted forest to the North of their village and retrieve his two children who wandered off. Veris is the one person in history who has managed to do this once before, but she’s in no hurry to return to that leafy hell.

The story is deeply atmospheric, and Premee Mohamed toes that line perfectly of making the world dark and fairy tale but also very real feeling. She doesn’t loose the substance of her ‘creepy’ in pursuit of the over the top language and it was fantastic. The costs are high, the forest is brutal, and I genuinely believed and enjoyed 95% of this story.

My only complaint was an entirely personal one, and one I can’t spoil. I’ll note as a content warning there is mentions of death of a child, but past that I’ll not elaborate. If you are wanting a dark fantasy with real costs and disturbing imagery then this is the one for you.

4 out of 5 creepy little kids.