Carrie Lee South’s In the Woods They Wait is a suspenseful novel with horror elements, astute prose, and emotional heft. The book opens in 2004 when Audrey Figg is a teenager tasked with watching her younger brother. He disappears into the woods of Devil’s Den State Park within the Ozark Mountains. Fifteen years later, Audrey is a park ranger in the same woods, and a little girl goes missing, echoing her brother’s disappearance.
The author drew on her own sibling loss to imbue the book with the complexity of grief and the terror of loss. It is a suspenseful novel with line-level precision. South’s description of setting is also forceful, and the natural world is a presence throughout her debut novel.
I spoke via email with South about writing suspense and twists, her own connection to the Ozarks, and the influences that informed her horror novel In the Woods They Wait.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Athena Waligore: Early praise for your debut is calling your book terrifying. Were there moments during writing when you yourself were scared?
Carrie Lee South: Yes, but not necessarily during the moments that are designed to be terrifying. When I’m writing descriptions of things like gore, I’m having too much fun to be scared. Delving into my main character’s emotions is another story. In the opening scenes, Audrey does something cruel that results in her little brother going missing. I’m a big sister, so I’m intimately familiar with that kind of terror. It’s like when you’re roughhousing as a kid, but you accidentally overdo it and you’re afraid of your parents finding out, but multiply that feeling by a thousand. Writing those moments of realization when she knows she’s caused irreparable damage were really difficult.
AW: Can you tell us about the novel’s setting and your own connection to the Ozarks?
CLS: We moved to “The Natural State” when I was four. I was the kind of kid who would just wander into the woods around my house to collect acorns and blue jay feathers and other treasures, or peel the bark off sweetgum trees to map the patterns of beetle trails. I even knew which wild plants I could pick and chew on in my neighborhood. There are more beautiful state parks here than I can name, but when I first visited Northwest Arkansas and explored Devil’s Den State Park, I became enamored with the sandstone formations and barred cave entrances. The story started developing right then and there.
AW: Your bio notes you spend a lot of time with birds. How did your connection to the natural world come into play in this novel?
CLS: I think it’s so important to be present and connected to the physical world we occupy, especially now that we spend so much time in the digital space. Birdwatching requires a level of focus and attention to detail that helps me stay grounded in the moment and aware of the creatures we share this planet with. In the novel, I wanted to explore the ways that humans have affected the natural order of things, so you’ll notice mentions of extinction, bats suffering from human-borne viruses, animals turning to opportunistic feeding due to human encroachment, etc.
AW: I wondered about a nod to Liz Moore’s The God of the Woods in a certain way, which is also concerned with secrets and caretaking. Were you intending that or perhaps can you tell us about other novels or works in other genres that served as inspiration?
CLS: I finished drafting In the Woods They Wait before I read God of the Woods, but I loved that book and did take inspiration from the way Liz Moore presented her dual timeline structure. There are notes of Jaws and Jurassic Park in my work, but thematically I think the novel owes a big debt to the short story “The Scarlet Ibis” by James Hurst. An older brother pushes his disabled sibling too far and the resulting tragedy haunts him for the rest of his life. I first read it over twenty years ago and it still breaks my heart when I think about it. I’d also be remiss if I didn’t mention how much I listened to the Swiss Army Man soundtrack while I wrote.
AW: There are two timelines at play in the novel. Can you tell us about that choice and how you knew that’s how the book would be?
CLS: The first draft of the novel only followed the present day. It felt incomplete. The events of the past inform so many of Audrey’s choices, and the consequences of her actions continue to echo throughout her life, so it became clear once I started the second draft that I needed to bring that into focus. It was almost like writing a second story, and then finding how they’re interwoven. So much of my revision process involved moving scenes around so that all of them would flow into one another.
AW: The prose is great! In the opening pages, I chuckled with delight when a young employee at the park is described as “so green he could give you grass stains.” Can you tell us about your process of working with line level details while keeping the novel moving?
CLS: Thank you! Line level writing is where I have the most fun. That’s when writing feels like play. I love finding new ways to describe familiar experiences, and the idea that someone will read one of my lines and be struck by it in some way is really what fuels me. When it comes to big picture plot and pacing, I think of it more like completing a jigsaw puzzle. I need all of the pieces to fit exactly right to reveal the full picture. It’s satisfying, but in a different way.
AW: I understand you’ve been writing stories and books since age six. How long was this particular story percolating before publication?
CLS: It’s really hard to pinpoint when I started telling stories. My mom used to keep a bucket of books in the bathroom, and even before I knew how to read she would lose me for long stretches of time because I would be in there making up stories to go along with the pictures. With In the Woods They Wait, I needed to write to process my grief after losing my little brother. The initial idea came to me as soon as I heard the name “Devil’s Den” and visited the park. I wrote the first draft in 2022, and I’ve been revising and editing ever since.
AW: There are some plot twists! Without giving anything away as spoilers, can you tell us a bit about those themes or your intent there?
CLS: So much of the novel is about grief and the nature of loss, but when it comes to that big plot twist, I’ll say this: nature isn’t cruel or evil, it’s just indifferent to us and it isn’t always fair. There are forces that we have absolutely no control over, despite how much we think we’ve stacked the odds in our favor. Humans have barely scratched the surface when it comes to what we know about our planet. So much remains unexplored, and I think it’s important for us to remember it has been here much, much longer than we have.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Carrie Lee South earned her MFA at the Arkansas Writers Workshop where she served as the fiction editor for the literary magazine Arkana. She’s currently the fiction editor at StoryBottle Co. Her work has appeared in Waxwing, F(r)iction, Iron Horse Literary Review, Tales to Terrify, and elsewhere. When she’s not reading and writing, she’s spending time with birds—the ones outside and the four parrots that live in her house.
ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER: Athena Waligore is a Brooklyn-based writer and journalist. She was previously an editor at Interior Design magazine and currently manages communications for NYC’s public works agency. She writes fiction and is currently working on a novel.