Silence in the Woods (J.P. Choquette) is an interesting collection of little contradictions– it’s a bigfoot novel with very little bigfoot to be seen. It’s a thriller with very few thrilling things happening in real-time and which loses much of its tension due to its own story structure. It’s a very fast and engaging novel which manages to be so despite a complete lack of interesting characters and a muddy, unfocused plot.

NOTE: This review is NOT spoiler-free.

From the word go, the extremely fast pace is the highlight of the novel. Choquette’s writing has that indefinable quality which makes the pages melt away, which is especially impressive because not one of these characters is actually likable. Ostensibly, we’re supposed to be invested in Paul and Jane, who have been separated due to circumstances which become more clear throughout the novel.  The problem is that the lightning speed of the novel doesn’t really leave room for deep characterization, so we’re left with two characters who are goody-two-shoes cardboard cutouts and two who are at first vaguely annoying and who are later revealed to be outright bad people. The pace is a double-edged sword in that it captivates the reader but does not allow the author room to breathe beyond a few token establishing scenes.

The other problem with the speed of the writing is that it often forces Choquette to step on the plot. Half of the story is being told in flashbacks, which is far more than should be in a story that wants to hang its hat on plot twists. This becomes most obvious in the second half of the book– once Paul has discovered that Jane is alive we know the outcome of the flashback sequences. We may be missing details, but we don’t need the perfunctory descriptions of the last two or three flashback chapters because they no longer contribute to any sense of tension in the story.

Furthermore, the plot itself is stretched very thin. In the beginning, the reader is led to believe that the evil in the woods is the mysterious sasquatch-like creature reported by hikers in the area. Ultimately, that creature winds up having been a random force for good and the real evil is another entity which is never fulfillingly described or explored. It feels like the antagonistic force simply appears to function as a plot twist, and one which has been so heavily foreshadowed that its reveal has little to no impact. The bigfoot is seen in less than a handful of scenes, in two of which it serves no purpose beyond being a deus ex machina.

Then, in what is perhaps the most bizarre attempt at a secondary climax I’ve ever seen, Paul and Jane are attacked by a bear as they flee the cave. This is meant to make their journey more harrowing and to set up a final chapter with a did-they-make-it sort of tension…but that could have been done with the evil spirit in the cave, which would have given more development time to that evil force and would have made the story feel more unified. I know this is a prequel to a longer series and I fully expect that some of these issues make more sense in that broader scope, but as a stand-alone novel Silence in the Woods feels far too unfocused and simply doesn’t deliver on a lot of its own setup in a satisfying way. In a word, this one feels rushed.