What is Laird Hunt reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Laird Hunt, author of In the House in the Dark of the Woods.

His entry begins:

While I always have multiple books on my nightstand (I mostly read in bed) the book that is preoccupying me with the most insistence is the new Penguin Book of Japanese Short Stories edited by Jay Rubin and with an introduction, and a couple of fine stories, by Haruki Murakami. For some years now I have been closely following the work of Japan’s new wave of extraordinary fictioneers – like Mieko Kawakami, Tomoyuki Hoshino, Tomoka Shibasaki and Hideo Furukawa – largely through the yearly appearance of...[read on]

About In the House in the Dark of the Woods, from the publisher:

“Once upon a time there was and there wasn’t a woman who went to the woods.”

In this horror story set in colonial New England, a law-abiding Puritan woman goes missing. Or perhaps she has fled or abandoned her family. Or perhaps she’s been kidnapped, and set loose to wander in the dense woods of the north. Alone and possibly lost, she meets another woman in the forest. Then everything changes.

On a journey that will take her through dark woods full of almost-human wolves, through a deep well wet with the screams of men, and on a living ship made of human bones, our heroine may find that the evil she flees has been inside her all along. In the House in the Dark of the Woods is a novel of psychological horror and suspense told in Laird Hunt’s characteristically lyrical prose style. It is the story of a bewitching, a betrayal, a master huntress and her quarry. It is a story of anger, of evil, of hatred and of redemption. It is the story of a haunting, a story that makes up the bedrock of American mythology, but told in a vivid way you will never forget.

Visit Laird Hunt's Facebook page, and Twitter perch.

The Page 69 Test: Neverhome.

My Book, The Movie: Neverhome.

My Book, The Movie: In the House in the Dark of the Woods.

Writers Read: Laird Hunt.

--Marshal Zeringue