“All my stories are about you”: CG Drew’s’ Don’t Let the Forest In
There is perhaps nothing more monstrous than love. It’s the one beast to which we all feed ourselves willingly, the one which takes the most infinite number of forms. It is timid and bold both at once, sneaking up from the shadows or crashing headlong in the daylight to consume us wholly. It’s the one creature we all aspire to meet; the one Thing we wish to protect and nourish our whole lives through. A pet that keeps its counsel within each of our chests.
Recently, however, there has felt to be an increase of fear. In the US, at least, and many other places besides, the fear and anxiety for the future — and the present — is palpable. Perhaps nowhere is this more true than in the arts and in how we engage with others. In the one hand, artists are beating down every door and yelling into every ear that destruction and censorship, the chewing up and spitting out of a soulless program over a human being, is the equivalent of willingly and joyfully watching both the death of the world and the death of the soul. In the other, we’ve not quite ever recovered from the isolation necessitated by early COVID-era shut downs and isolation; often it feels like so many have become so emboldened by speaking behind a screen that they forget the human being on the other side of it. Not even to speak of the current sociopolitical climate that festers around us at the time of this writing.
All this to say: every willful act of pen to paper, charcoal to canvas, physical craft and interaction is feeling ever closer to a statement of defiance in the face of a world that seems to want nothing more than for us to forget the world outside of our immediate surroundings. Forget our humanity in favor of complacency. Forget the all-consuming monstrous love for one another we must feed in order to keep going.
When I first got CG Drews’s Don’t Let the Forest In from NetGalley for review in the latter part of 2024, I did not anticipate receiving it as such a statement of humanity and creation. I was, quite frankly, amid a period of darkness within myself that comes calling toward the winter months and, while Don’t Let the Forest In was a sharp little bit of comfort, I had been sapped of all mental energy to articulate exactly what it brought out for me. It is full to bursting with thorns and yearning, love and twisting vines of trauma, darkness and fire in equal measure. It is sad, and angry, and queer. Unapologetically violent and strange and beautiful. Don’t Let the Forest In is a Gothic bit of YA with enough bite in all the right places to remind readers of the value and necessity of gaining strength from open vulnerability.
We follow Andrew and Thomas as they return to boarding school after a summer break in which a trauma has occurred. Andrew only feels safe and whole with his sister Dove and Thomas around, and Thomas is all bite all the time to everyone but Andrew. The two complete each other even down to an artistic level — Andrew writes fairy tale vignettes full of longing and suffering; Thomas draws creatures brimming with teeth and claws. They’re a brutal pairing, a hard outer shell and a fleshy, bleeding core. When the relationship structure that keeps them all whole starts to feel like it’s straining — not to mention the whispers of monsters in the woods — and the violence hits too close to home for their liking, Thomas and Andrew must confront several incalculably difficult things at once if they wish to survive intact.
Forest is a story about shaping and sharing reality through creation, longing for connection and not knowing how to grasp for it. It is a story about creation as an act of love and survival all in one. It is absolutely necessary to the heart of this work that the boys’ artistic outlets be physically a part of themselves. A compulsion they are not complete without, and the one tool in their respective arsenals that ensures they remain grounded and together with the things, people, and places they value most. It is also just as much a twisting heartbreak of a tale that will sink its roots into you and propel you along its pages faster than you realize, until you reach the great monstrous crescendo that whispers its end.
I am delighted to have received an advance copy of this book from the publisher and NetGalley in exchange for an honest review, but I am equally as happy to have revisited it and gotten to see the illustrations peppered throughout that serve as peeks into both Andrew and Thomas’s minds. If dark fairy tales, Gothic hungry monsters, and queer yearning are your thing, CG Drews has crafted just the book for you with their own two, viny little hands.
