There are countless reasons why the woods make for a great setting in novels.

In the woods, it’s easy for us to get lost, easy to think we’re progressing towards a destination only to find ourselves back where we started, easy to disappear. In the woods, technology is unreliable, and often we find it best to leave our phones behind. Our senses are sometimes heightened and sometimes dampened. Creatures crawl in and out of sight. Often, we encounter a house, isolated, mysterious. We can tiptoe around and sneak up on people, watch them. Or we can be confronted by danger with very little warning of its approach. In the woods, evil acts are easily concealed.

My debut novel, "Sister Creatures," features the woods of Louisiana, Maryland, Bavaria and Washington, and these sections were definitely the most fun to write. Each of these settings has its own characteristics that complement my characters as they grow up and move forward through life. Sometimes a place of threat and sometimes a place of refuge, the woods proved to be a great tool for revealing my protagonists’ psychology and for adding tension to my narrative.

Tangled trees, forests, the Everglades, even a moor. The five books on this list utilize these wild settings to play out their dark, strange and magical moments.

Mayra by Nicky Gonzalez

In her girlhood, Ingrid experienced a friendship with Mayra that was so intense and all-consuming she assumed they’d be bonded for life. But they grew up and grew apart, following different paths. After years of near estrangement, Mayra invites Ingrid to visit her at an enormous house in the Florida Everglades, and Ingrid goes, hoping it’ll be like old times. She assumes it will be just the two of them, but when she arrives, she learns Mayra’s odd boyfriend Benji is there, too. She plans on staying only a couple of days, but she finds that once she’s there, it’s difficult (or perhaps impossible) to leave. Surreal, claustrophobic, lush and dangerous, "Mayra" explores whether we can ever truly go back to the way things were.

I Gave You Eyes and You Looked to Darkness by Irene Solà, translated by Mara Faye Lethem

It turns out that there’s one thing even more ill-advised than making a deal with the devil: making a deal with the devil and then trying to trick him so that you don’t have to hold up your end of the bargain. That’s what Joana attempted long ago in the dark woods of Catalonia, and she and her descendants are paying for it. They are all born missing something essential, and together they live out their lives and their deaths in an old, isolated farmhouse called Mas Cavell. Taking place over the course of a single day while they wait for an elderly family member to die so they can throw her a party, "I Gave You Eyes and You Looked to Darkness" is a wild, visceral ride through both suffering and merriment.

Smothermoss by Alisa Alering

In Appalachian Pennsylvania, half-sisters Sheila and Angie live in poverty, fending for themselves in their mountain wilderness while their overworked mother struggles to keep them afloat. For years, 17-year-old Sheila has been made to carry a heavy, supernatural burden, and it’s becoming unbearable, practically choking her with its weight. She has a hard time seeing 12-year-old Angie as anything but a nuisance, babyish in the way she acts out imaginary war games and draws monsters on cards that she leaves behind everywhere. But when two women are murdered on the nearby Appalachian Trail, Sheila and Angie must come together to save themselves from the darkness threatening their home.

The Fell by Sarah Moss

Kate is confined to her home during a mandatory pandemic lockdown, and she just cannot stand it anymore. And so, she leaves her teenage son and her phone behind, just to go on a hike she’s been on countless times before. She’ll be back before anyone even knows she’s gone. Once she starts, she finds it difficult to stop, and as the sun sets, she walks onto a vast expanse of moorland with its dangerous rocks that drop to the valley below. In darkness, she falls. With Kate injured to the point where she can hardly sit and see over the thick and tangled heather, in the midst of streams and bogs and deafening wind, the moor in "The Fell" is wild and unsteady, matching Kate’s wild and unsteady psyche. In this slim, propulsive novel, the consequences are intense. What a miracle it is to even wake up each day and choose to go on living.

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk, translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones

In case anyone missed this masterpiece by this Nobel Prize-winning genius, I’ll go ahead and recommend one of my favorites. Only three people live year-round in the Polish village that is the setting for this brilliant novel, which features such things as astrology, entomology and the translations of William Blake. Until one of them is murdered, that is, reducing the number of permanent residents to two: Janina and Oddball. Really, in a place this remote, the land rightfully belongs to the animals. At least that’s how Janina sees it. Unfortunately, not everyone agrees. Next to the bordering forest are hunting pulpits, the site of unspeakable evils against innocent creatures. As more people die in the dark woods in increasingly gruesome ways, Janina strives to convince everyone it’s the animals enacting their revenge.