Fiona Barnett’s The Dark Between The Trees is set in the mysterious Moresby Wood in two timelines – today and 1963.
In 1643 a small group of Parliamentarian soldiers are ambushed in an isolated part of Northern England. Their only hope for survival is to flee into the nearby Moresby Wood… unwise though that may seem. For Moresby Wood is known to be an unnatural place, the realm of witchcraft and shadows, where the devil is said to go walking by moonlight…
Seventeen men enter the wood. Only two are ever seen again, and the stories they tell of what happened make no sense. Stories of shifting landscapes, of trees that appear and disappear at will… and of something else. Something dark. Something hungry.
Today, five women are headed into Moresby Wood to discover, once and for all, what happened to that unfortunate group of soldiers. Led by Dr Alice Christopher, an historian who has devoted her entire academic career to uncovering the secrets of Moresby Wood. Armed with metal detectors, GPS units, mobile phones and the most recent map of the area (which is nearly 50 years old), Dr Christopher’s group enters the wood ready for anything. Or so they think.
We spoke to the author Fiona Barnett about The Dark Between The Trees, folktales and what she has coming up next…
Where did you first get the idea for The Dark Between The Trees?
A couple of years ago, I fell headlong into a fascination with the British Civil Wars in the 1640s and 50s, and the ordinary people who lived through it. At the time you couldn’t really tell which side a person was on based on where in the country they came from, what their religion was, and who their family were.
At the same time, there was so much propaganda flying around – often mixed up with superstitions, and sometimes just with outright lies. How could anyone trust what they heard about the world? And then, of course, three and a half centuries later, how do historians interpret the information they get about what was happening back then? Those two questions gnawed away at me, and The Dark Between the Trees was the result.
What are the book’s main themes?
At its core, it’s a story about a particular patch of woods, at several points in its history: the seventeenth century and the twenty-first century (with an honourable mention for the fourteenth century, if you squint). When things go wrong – and oh by the way the woods are haunted, things are going to go wrong – how do people understand that differently at those different points? And are any of them right?
The Dark Between The Trees is split with two stories taking place at different times. How did it come about for you to tell these two stories over alternate chapters?
The leader of my modern group is an academic historian called Alice, who wants most of all to know what it must have felt like to be one of the missing group of seventeenth-century soldiers. And that’s what I always want to know about history too! I want to know what it felt like, and how that was different from my own experiences of the world. Putting those next to each other was a cool way to highlight their similarities and differences – and the strengths and weaknesses of both.
What was the process of telling those two stories?
I wrote the book as you read it – start to finish, alternating chapters between the two groups. I had to go back and make sure each half worked on its own, of course. But I love books where several stories are intertwined and build on each other, so it felt quite intuitive to write it that way.
Were you inspired by any real-life folk tales like the one spoken about in the book?
Not in terms of specifics, but I’m telling you, the general vibes of mid-seventeenth-century English ghost stories are wild. It makes so much sense that they are – living in the middle of a country at war with itself is enough to give anyone anxiety, and nightmares. There’s a sense of individuals with hardly any true information, but still trying to explain the unexplainable, that I really wanted to draw on in the book.
How much historical research did you do when writing Captain Davies’ story, which takes place in the 1600s?
Well, I wrote a quite in-depth podcast on the early part of the civil wars, so I did do a fair bit of research on the period – although most of it predated me actually writing the novel. In some ways, the 2009 half of the book is a reflection of my early discovery that researching the 1640s is difficult and frustrating if you want to do it justice!
What are you reading right now?
It’s definitely the time of year to read something nice and unsettling, so I’m halfway through The Changeling by Victor LaValle, with The House of Footsteps by Mathew West on my bedside table waiting to start. The last great thing I read was Composite Creatures by Caroline Hardaker.
What’s next for you?
The interaction between past and present (and not-quite-present) is still fascinating to me, and it’s something I’m still trying to explore in my next book. Although at this rate I think the next one will look quite different from The Dark Between the Trees! I’m still working out exactly what it’ll look like – but watch this space.
The Dark Between the Trees is out now.