Cracking the spine of a new Liz Moore novel feels like opening a gift from your most thoughtful friend: you may have no clue what the box contains, but it's sure to delight. Each of Moore's books thus far has been an acclaimed singular offering, blending genres and exploring complex topics, from the opioid crisis in Philadelphia to the vagaries of early artificial intelligence in the 1980s, along deeper themes of family, grief, and belonging.
With The God of the Woods, Moore delivers once more. In this taut and psychologically astute mystery, family, class, and power clash against the spectacular backdrop of the Adirondack Mountains in upstate New York. And there's a serial killer on the loose!
In August 1975, teenager Barbara Van Laar goes missing from the summer camp she attends in the shadow of her family's mansion. As a frantic search is organized, a previous Van Laar disappearance haunts the community: Barbara's brother Bear went missing fifteen years before, never to be found. In two timelines spanning the 1950-60s and the mid-1970s, The God of the Woods spins the web of not just one mystery but two. Moore deftly weaves in threads of family toxicity, social hierarchy, abuse, and misogyny, and ties it all up with an outstanding finish.
I had the pleasure of chatting with the author over Zoom recently.
This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.
Jenny Bartoy
Where did you get the idea for this book, broadly speaking?
Liz Moore
I have a long family history in the Adirondacks. My mother's ancestors migrated there from other parts of New England in the 1800s, and they lived in the Southern Adirondacks for about three to four generations. I spent a lot of time there growing up. My grandparents built a cabin and we still go there; I bring my own kids to the house. So the atmosphere of the area is a huge inspiration for the novel, along with some more true-life inspirations, like the [the serial killer] Robert Garrow who was incarcerated twice in the 1970s. He really haunted my imagination as a kid and I found it interesting to dive back into doing some actual research about his past as well. He was the loose inspiration for the character Jacob Sluiter in the novel.
Jenny Bartoy
Did the majestic setting of the Adirondacks open doors for you narratively or thematically?
Liz Moore
I think the theme of who has the right to a particular plot of land is perennial. And that is one of the themes at the heart of the book. Can one own land? Who has the right to own the land, [and] if so, how does class inform that question? In the real-life history of the Adirondack Park, European settlers displaced Iroquois and Algonquin peoples who had been using the land as a hunting ground, then the Europeans themselves had some infighting. In the early 1800s the logging industry took off, really energetically. And so the working class moved to the Adirondacks to log, and the first growth forest there was decimated. Something like 90 to 95% of the Adirondack Park is not first-growth forest because of that century of logging. A clergyman and writer named William H. H. Murray discovered the great beauty of the Adirondacks as a site of recreation, and wrote a book called Adventures in the Wilderness; Or, Camp-life in the Adirondacks, which became incredibly popular and lured tourists to the area for the first time, including many of the wealthiest, most dynastic families in the US, who built great camps in the area. And interestingly, only when the wealthiest families in the United States discovered the great beauty of the land, did the government take an interest in preserving it, which is typical. Suddenly, it became an important place to preserve, and that had the effect of displacing the working class or at least making it much harder for them to earn a living in the area. And so all of that history informs the class tensions within the novel as well. It's a real ensemble piece and some of the characters are representative of the wealthy, some are representative of the working class in the area, and some act as liaisons between the two.
Jenny Bartoy
At the center of The God of the Woods is a wealthy family whom you examine and dissect pretty thoroughly in terms of their avoidance of responsibility and its consequences. Almost anything seems justifiable to them in the name of reputation and money; and class is the spectrum along which they shift blame. Can you talk a little more about how these differences fueled your plot?
Liz Moore
One thing that was really interesting to me was the idea of rich people playing out survivalism in the wilderness versus poor people needing to actually know the skills of survival in order to literally survive. I wanted to include this character, Sluiter, who functions as a kind of ominous presence in the background for the whole novel, because the real-life inspiration for that character, Garrow, was himself raised in the wilderness and taught the skills of survival like hunting and trapping and fishing and living off the land. There were two manhunts for Garrow: the first time before he was first brought into custody, and the second time after he escaped from jail. Both times he was so hard to find because of his knowledge of the woods. And I loved the idea that somebody could use knowledge of the woods for nefarious purposes, or to outwit or outsmart the people tracking them. There was something very chilling to me about the idea of this woods-crafty killer on the loose, using the same skills that the children are being taught [at camp], to avoid capture. I love things that are two-sided or multifaceted. Here the same skills that can be used for good can also be used for evil.
Jenny Bartoy
The novel is set in the time period between the 1950s in the 1970s. What appealed to you about this era?
Liz Moore
One thing about having characters who represent all societal classes is that you have to look for themes that can apply across multiple axes. And one of them is the way in the 1950s and the 1970s — and still today, unfortunately — in which women within every societal class have sought power and lost power. There's a character called Alice Van Laar, who is very privileged in many ways and also completely infantilized in others. She was married off at 17 in what amounted to an arranged marriage to an older man and never had the chance to gain an education and has been suffering the consequences of that ever since. Another character, TJ Hewitt, is the young female director of the camp. Although it's never outright stated, she is a lesbian, and she's very much othered by many of the people in the story. She's struggling to find her place in this society as well, in a moment where to come out might have risked her livelihood as the director of a children's camp. And then one of the younger characters, Louise Donnadieu, is a working-class young woman who's found her way in as a camp counselor, which is a position typically reserved for children of the wealthy. She is fighting an uphill battle to feel as if she belongs. I found [that time period] interesting in that it was possible to explore that particular theme of the ways in which women were disempowered and infantilized across multiple social classes.
Jenny Bartoy
The question of female autonomy and power is a tension point throughout the story, from the campers who have to follow rules obviously, to the various adult women who are ordered around or abused or stopped in their tracks or even silenced. This sense of misogynistic oppression permeates the novel, almost like a ghost. Your female characters are shown to be intelligent and self-sufficient, but they can't exist as their whole selves.
Liz Moore
This relates to the name of the great home in the book, this mansion in the wilderness that the family has constructed and named "Self-Reliance." On the surface [it] is named after the Ralph Waldo Emerson essay of the same name, which promotes the idea that to be self-reliant and not depend on others is a very worthwhile quality to foster in oneself. And yet, to families like the Van Laars who operate in this very rigid way, their particular definition of self-reliance does not apply to the women in the family who are routinely disempowered, whether it's Alice Van Laar, the mother, or Barbara Van Laar, the daughter who goes missing. They also perceive themselves to be self-reliant in ways that they frankly are not. For example, they perceive themselves to have aggregated all of their great wealth and built this fantastic home, when in fact the home was built upon the backs of working class people. So they have a very narrow definition of self-reliance, and it certainly does not apply to the women. They don't wish for it to.
Jenny Bartoy
The absence of a mother is a recurring theme in your novels, with emphasis placed on the parental figures who step in to fill the gap. In The God of the Woods, chosen family plays a significant role again. Can you tell me about this theme in your writing?
Liz Moore
I think you're absolutely right, that one of the things that unites my novels, which on the surface present as very different from one another, is the theme of found family and how one's family of origin doesn't have to serve as one's ultimate family throughout one's life. In the case of The God of the Woods, Barbara Van Laar is the 13-year-old daughter who goes missing at the start of the novel. And she's really searching for any sort of belonging that she can find, and she does turn to adults outside of her family for that sense of belonging, for better or worse.
Jenny Bartoy
Grief is a central theme to the story as well. Not just grief for people who have died but grief too for people who are not who we wish they were, particularly parents. Can you talk about the importance of grief and longing in this narrative?
Liz Moore
I'm always looking for themes that can subconsciously propel a story. I never write specifically to a theme — and I think, if I did, the risk would be that my characters would feel very wooden or allegorical. Upon completing a first draft, I do start to consider: what is this book actually about? What is it really trying to say? And then in subsequent drafts, I go back and try to tease out moments of theme where I can. And the theme of grief, I would say, is a strong motivating factor: people seeking to heal their grief or to heal themselves in ways that are both healthy and damaging. When somebody seeks to heal their grief in a way that's unwise, that can become a domino effect and have outcomes that they didn't predict, which I do think is the case in this book.
Jenny Bartoy
You write with such compassion for your characters, with such emotional intelligence. How much of this is instinctive or simply reflective of who you are as a person, and how much of it gets intentionally layered into your character development as you revise?
Liz Moore
It is a product of my upbringing to always wonder about why people do bad things, and to be pretty resistant to the idea that they are inherently evil or a bad person. I had a mother growing up who, if I reported that some kid had mistreated me or had been mean to me, her very first question would be, "Well, what's their home life like? What's going on at home?" And that was frustrating growing up, because sometimes you just wanted a mom who would be an ally and would have your back, but I find myself doing the same thing with my own kids. And I do think it makes for a much more interesting view of the world if we consider all the motives behind a person's behavior rather than just writing them off as a human. And I guess that tendency does make its way into my writing. It's not particularly interesting to me to write just a bad guy. It's more interesting to me to consider how they came to do the actions that they're doing.
Jenny Bartoy
"When lost, sit down and yell." This advice is given to the kids when they arrive at Camp Emerson, and speaks to the density of the forest. Staying put may feel counterintuitive but increases your chance of being rescued. I like how the novel examines who is willing to do just that: whether to save yourself or wait to be saved — both metaphorically and literally.
Liz Moore
In some ways the idea of being self reliant is directly opposed to the idea of sitting down and yelling for help. And both are strong themes. I fundamentally disagree with Ralph Waldo Emerson, when he says that the pinnacle of character is self-reliance, because I believe in a society that relies upon others. I'm of the mindset that sometimes you do have to just sit down and yell when you're lost. That phrase is also something that I was really told as a child in the Adirondacks, if we were going on a hike or if I was given permission to play outside unsupervised near the edge of a forest. It was drilled into me that it's very easy to become confused and turned around, and to think that you're walking in the right direction when in fact you are not. So sitting down and yelling is good practical advice for when you are lost. But you're right that it does carry within it this contradiction, which is that it's really meant for people who aren't as skilled in the woods as the camp would like to hope its campers are, for example. There is an inherent tension around that phrase. But it is good advice. If anybody's reading the book and retains that information and uses it, I'll be very happy!
FICTION
The God of the Woods
By Liz Moore
Riverhead Books
Published July 2, 2024
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