Unwed mothers, witches, folklore, haunted woods. These ingredients form the nucleus of C.J. Cooke’s The Ghost Woods. Although initially published in the UK in 2022, Cooke’s novel lands on US bookshelves in April 2025. Cooke’s story focuses on two young women in two different times – 17-year-old Mabel in 1959 and 22-year-old Pearl – who are both spending their last days of pregnancy at Lichen Hall, owned by the Whitlock family. Just the name Lichen Hall conjures up some creepy imagery but the history surrounding the location is just as creepy.
In the midst of the woods stands a house called Lichen Hall.
This place is shrouded in folklore—old stories of ghosts, of witches, of a child who was not quite a child.
Now the woods are creeping closer, and something has been unleashed.
Pearl Gorham arrives in 1965, one of a string of young women sent to Lichen Hall to give birth. And she soon suspects the proprietors are hiding something.
Then she meets the mysterious mother and young boy who live in the grounds—and together they begin to unpick the secrets of this place.
As the truth comes to the surface and the darkness moves in, Pearl must rethink everything she knew—and risk what she holds most dear.
Mabel is unsure of how she became pregnant, she just was pregnant one day. Pearl knows how her pregnancy came to be, but she is nonetheless sent to Lichen Hall. She loses her job as a nurse because of her pregnancy, but that experience might come in handy in a home full of young women who would need some medical assistance. Mrs. Whitlock keeps a very strict house, the girls are assigned jobs to help with the maintenance of the house. Her husband is not healthy in either timeline, and their grandchild (whose parents died under mysterious circumstances before the novel’s start) initially fits the mold of the “creepy kid.”
Both Mabel and Pearl feel something is a little “off” with the Whitlock family and as they learn more about the dark history of Lichen Hall, they realize something dark and haunted may be hanging over the place where they are forced to spend the final days of a major physical transformation as they prepare to give birth. The fact that Mrs. Whitlock often refuses reaching outside of Lichen Hall for medical assistance adds even more pressure to these young, expecting women.
Where to start…I suppose the atmosphere. Cooke steeps her narrative in a gloomy, foggy dread that hangs over the entirety of the novel. These young women are marked as tainted or wrong because of what they are going through, which makes living in a strict home that is potentially haunted even more harrowing. There’s a local folk tale of a witch, Nicniven that haunts the background and mushrooms/fungus that creep all over the place. That element reminded me of the fiction of T. Kingfisher and Jeff VanderMeer.
However, there are slivers of hope poking through that gloomy fog. Pearl is that driving force of hope. Perhaps because she is a bit older than some of the other girls, she’s got a level of maturity provided by her wider experience in the world. She tries to understand Mrs. Whitlock’s grandson, she tries to understand the haunted nature of her situation.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t remark on the timing of this novel being released in the United States because it has major themes in common with Grady Hendrix’s Witchcraft for Wayward Girls. Both are set at a time when unwed, expectant mothers are treated like the scourge of society and involve supernatural elements. I don’t think the timing is anything more than coincidental. That said, the quality of both novels is very high.
This is the third novel I’ve read by Cooke over the last year and a half and like the previous two, I was very impressed by this novel. I was pulled in very strongly to both Mabel and Pearl’s narrative and could feel the mounting dread that suffused both timelines. Cook tackles a powerful social injustice and adds layers of horror and dread for a creepy, and enthralling reading experience. I’m even more encouraged to dive into The Nesting and The Lighthouse Witches, which along with The Ghost House form a loose spiritual trilogy of her fiction.
Recommended
© 2025 Rob H. Bedford
Trade Paperback | Berkley
April 2025 | 384 Pages
https://carolynjesscooke.com/
Review copy courtesy of the publisher, Berkley Publishing
