Thanks to NetGalley for the arc. All opinions are my own (clearly).

Don’t Let the Forest In follows Andrew Perrault in the aftermath of a mysterious friendship disaster between his twin, Dawn, and his obsessive crush, Thomas. His return to Wickwood Academy is bad enough, dealing with having no friends and continued bullying, when Thomas’s monsterous drawings come to life, threatening him and everyone around him. Together, the two boys try to rub their two braincells together to put an end to the monsters and figure out what they mean to each other, even as the horrific odds turn against them. The result is a poorly anchored book with terribly handled twists and weak characters.

The main problem with the book is the lack of on-page set up for characters and their relationships. Much of the premise of the book lies in how different Thomas and Dawn act with Andrew compared to when their friendship at its peak. Unfortunately, their friendship is completely off page, so the whip-lash that Andrew feels has to be tediously explained to us. The reader is meant to understand that these characters have this deeply established connection, without any work being done to make us believe it. This is a huge issue, as this book revolves around Andrew and Thomas’s intensely obsessive and codependent relationship.

The problem with the relationships is also tied to Andrew’s weakness as a character. He is completely obtuse about the things going around him and he’s annoying to read about. Things that are obviously worth considering about the horrors haunting him and the people around him fly right over his head every time, making for an incredibly frustrating reading experience. The way he speaks is so melodramatic and overwrought that it’s laughable. This continues into the excerpts of his fairytales, which are all edgy and fake-deep.

I appreciate what C. G Drews tried to do with Andrew as a representation of anxiety, depression, and eating disorders, but the work put in didn’t work on-page. As an audience, the reader is out of the loop of his non-monster anxieties, so he sometimes makes leaps in logic that make no sense and we can’t even see how he got there. Ideally, the reader would be led onto the same traps that Andrew’s anxiety leads him, but instead it’s confusing and aggravating. I also think the way that mental health is sometimes shown plainly on-page and other times in symbolic imagery and allegory creates a confused depiction of mental illness.

I also found the exploration of Asexuality to be mixed. I was very excited as an Ace-spectrum person to see how this was done, and I’m still not sure. For a YA audience, I would expect the explanation of asexuality to be heavy handed, but that wasn’t what I got. An actual introduction of asexuality doesn’t exist at all, but Andrew’s fears and feelings about being “wrong” are who’ll to explained to the point of being repetitive. I’ll be honest, some of my opinions about the representation is clouded by how little I cared about Andrew as a character. I can’t really complain about it though, because this was one of the better elements.

The decent element is the horror. It’s not the best I’ve read even in YA, but it’s competent. The gore is gorey and gave me the creeps more than a couple times. My only issue with the horror is how poorly rooted it is within the story. This is the same issue I had with character relationships. The characters know all about these monsters and why they are important to them, but it’s only clunkily explained to the reader. The horror also suffers by the poorly defined setting and passage of time. Every time the time of day was mentioned, it was news to me. The characters just float around from scene to scene untethered. This is emphasized by the unrealistic dialogue and one-dimensional supporting characters.

No one in this book talks like real people. I understand the point of exaggerating for the purpose of creating drama and tension, but this book’s attempt was laughable. Andrew and Thomas say unhinged things about living inside each other and how they’d die without each other, but I could at least see the draw of that. The background characters spend most of the book bullying Thomas for being a murderer, even at times where if they truly believe this, they would be in immense danger. As the death toll increases, the lack of panic is covered up because the school is just ignoring people dying in the middle of day for some reason. The main bully repeatedly complains about people “slandering” him. I mean, this is just ridiculous, people. Some side characters I actually like, Lana Lang (unrelated to Superman’s friend) and Chloe Nguyen, are sidelined by the narrative in favor of the riveting relationship between Andrew and Thomas. Some characters aren’t even deigned to have names, even if they eventually get significant page time. Anyone who isn’t directly related to the romance/monster plot is severely undeveloped compared to Andrew and Thomas, and I already said how lacking they are as characters.

The final nail in the coffin is the horrible ending. I don’t want to spoil the twist(s) but I can stress how hard they fall on their face. There are fakeouts that are so dumb to be laughable. There is an actually good twist that is ruined because of execution. And there is a final twist that is SO OBVIOUS because it had been a blind spot in the boys’ pisspoor problem solving the whole book. The thematic meaning behind the horror fails to meaningfully connect to the characters and their terrible romance. What makes things worse is that these twists rely on the established character relationships that never got fleshed out the entire book.

Overall, I can see how teens would get a little bit more out of this than I would, and it could be worth checking out at a library if it’s convenient. That being said, I’m not that far out of teenhood and I know that I would not have been charmed by this. Everything that this book does has been done better by other books. I can’t strongly recommend it to anyone.