Into the Woods: A Novel

Danger. Deceit. Disaster. All in a few short weeks of summer vacation.

School is out and ten-year-old Billy Raymond can’t wait to have fun, but having fun means doing forbidden things. Billy is timid around adults, and he and always afraid of getting in trouble, but that doesn’t stop him from cussing, trespassing on local farms, stealing from home construction sites, going to dangerous places, and lying to his parents about all of it.

The one thing Billy wants his parents to know is the cruelty of his twelve-year-old neighbor, David Oskandy. But they (his father mostly, from outdated notions of interchild relationships) can’t understand David’s true threat, and dismiss it as relatively harmless bullying. What’s worse, if they did understand, they (his mother mainly) would do something about it, and Billy would suffer that much more at David’s hands during the workweek, when all the parents are gone, and “kids rule.”

So Billy conceals most of his conflict with David. But David is more vicious than anyone imagines, and when a teenager humiliates David in front of all the neighborhood kids, David’s plan for revenge can’t possibly be hidden.

Into the Woods is a novel about the importance of empathy in children, youth violence, and failing to foresee tragedy that--in hindsight--could have been prevented. Into the Woods portrays weekday lives children hide from their working parents: lives that are comic, sometimes frightening, every so often out of control, and once in a great while tragic.