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The Thing in the Forest
Leaves rustle underfoot in a dark wood: two little girls, extracted from their homes in wartime London, encounter something terrifying in a forest. Later when they meet as grown women, they realise the experience has coloured their lives. A dark tale about the nature of stories themselves.
Part of the Storycuts series, this short story was originally published in the collection Little Black Book of Stories.
Part of the Storycuts series, this short story was originally published in the collection Little Black Book of Stories.
52 pages, Kindle Edition
First published November 17, 2011
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401 people want to read
About the author
A.S. Byatt
197 books2,846 followersA.S. Byatt (Antonia Susan Byatt) is internationally known for her novels and short stories. Her novels include the Booker Prize winner Possession, The Biographer’s Tale and the quartet, The Virgin in the Garden, Still Life, Babel Tower and A Whistling Woman, and her highly acclaimed collections of short stories include Sugar and Other Stories, The Matisse Stories, The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye, Elementals and her most recent book Little Black Book of Stories. A distinguished critic as well as a writer of fiction, A S Byatt was appointed CBE in 1990 and DBE in 1999.
BYATT, Dame Antonia (Susan), (Dame Antonia Duffy), DBE 1999 (CBE 1990); FRSL 1983; Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (France), 2003 , writer; born 24 Aug. 1936;
Daughter of His Honour John Frederick Drabble, QC and late Kathleen Marie Bloor
Byatt has famously been engaged in a long-running feud with her novelist sister, Margaret Drabble, over the alleged appropriation of a family tea-set in one of her novels. The pair seldom see each other and each does not read the books of the other.
Married
1st, 1959, Ian Charles Rayner Byatt (Sir I. C. R. Byatt) marriage dissolved. 1969; one daughter (one son deceased)
2nd, 1969, Peter John Duffy; two daughters.
Education
Sheffield High School; The Mount School, York; Newnham College, Cambridge (BA Hons; Hon. Fellow 1999); Bryn Mawr College, Philadelphia, USA; Somerville College, Oxford.
Academic Honours:
Hon. Fellow, London Inst., 2000; Fellow UCL, 2004
Hon. DLitt: Bradford, 1987; DUniv York, 1991; Durham, 1991; Nottingham, 1992; Liverpool, 1993; Portsmouth, 1994; London, 1995; Sheffield, 2000; Kent 2004; Hon. LittD Cambridge, 1999
Prizes
The PEN/Macmillan Silver Pen Of Fiction prize, 1986 for STILL LIFE
The Booker Prize, 1990, for POSSESSION
Irish Times/Aer Lingus International Fiction Prize, 1990 for POSSESSION
The Eurasian section of Best Book in Commonwealth Prize, 1991 for POSSESSION
Premio Malaparte, Capri, 1995;
Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Adult Literature, California, 1998 for THE DJINN IN THE NIGHTINGALE''S EYE
Shakespeare Prize, Toepfer Foundation, Hamburg, 2002;
Publications:
The Shadow of the Sun, 1964;
Degrees of Freedom, 1965 (reprinted as Degrees of Freedom: the early novels of Iris Murdoch, 1994);
The Game, 1967;
Wordsworth and Coleridge in their Time, 1970 (reprinted as Unruly Times: Wordsworth and Coleridge in their Time, 1989);
Iris Murdoch 1976
The Virgin in the Garden, 1978;
GEORGE ELIOT Selected Essays, Poems and Other Writings , 1979 (editor);
Still Life, 1985
Sugar and Other Stories, 1987;
George Eliot: selected essays, 1989 (editor)
Possession: a romance, 1990
Robert Browning''s Dramatic Monologues, 1990 (editor);
Passions of the Mind, (essays), 1991;
Angels and Insects (novellas),1992
The Matisse Stories (short stories),1993;
The Djinn in the Nightingale''s Eye: five fairy stories, 1994
Imagining Characters, 1995 (joint editor);
New Writing 4, 1995 (joint editor);
Babel Tower, 1996;
New Writing 6, 1997 (joint editor);
The Oxford Book of English Short Stories, 1998 (editor);
Elementals: Stories of fire and ice (short stories), 1998;
The Biographer''s Tale, 2000;
On Histories and Stories (essays), 2000;
Portraits in Fiction, 2001;
The Bird Hand Book, 2001 (Photographs by Victor Schrager Text By AS Byatt);
A Whistling Woman, 2002
Little
BYATT, Dame Antonia (Susan), (Dame Antonia Duffy), DBE 1999 (CBE 1990); FRSL 1983; Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (France), 2003 , writer; born 24 Aug. 1936;
Daughter of His Honour John Frederick Drabble, QC and late Kathleen Marie Bloor
Byatt has famously been engaged in a long-running feud with her novelist sister, Margaret Drabble, over the alleged appropriation of a family tea-set in one of her novels. The pair seldom see each other and each does not read the books of the other.
Married
1st, 1959, Ian Charles Rayner Byatt (Sir I. C. R. Byatt) marriage dissolved. 1969; one daughter (one son deceased)
2nd, 1969, Peter John Duffy; two daughters.
Education
Sheffield High School; The Mount School, York; Newnham College, Cambridge (BA Hons; Hon. Fellow 1999); Bryn Mawr College, Philadelphia, USA; Somerville College, Oxford.
Academic Honours:
Hon. Fellow, London Inst., 2000; Fellow UCL, 2004
Hon. DLitt: Bradford, 1987; DUniv York, 1991; Durham, 1991; Nottingham, 1992; Liverpool, 1993; Portsmouth, 1994; London, 1995; Sheffield, 2000; Kent 2004; Hon. LittD Cambridge, 1999
Prizes
The PEN/Macmillan Silver Pen Of Fiction prize, 1986 for STILL LIFE
The Booker Prize, 1990, for POSSESSION
Irish Times/Aer Lingus International Fiction Prize, 1990 for POSSESSION
The Eurasian section of Best Book in Commonwealth Prize, 1991 for POSSESSION
Premio Malaparte, Capri, 1995;
Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Adult Literature, California, 1998 for THE DJINN IN THE NIGHTINGALE''S EYE
Shakespeare Prize, Toepfer Foundation, Hamburg, 2002;
Publications:
The Shadow of the Sun, 1964;
Degrees of Freedom, 1965 (reprinted as Degrees of Freedom: the early novels of Iris Murdoch, 1994);
The Game, 1967;
Wordsworth and Coleridge in their Time, 1970 (reprinted as Unruly Times: Wordsworth and Coleridge in their Time, 1989);
Iris Murdoch 1976
The Virgin in the Garden, 1978;
GEORGE ELIOT Selected Essays, Poems and Other Writings , 1979 (editor);
Still Life, 1985
Sugar and Other Stories, 1987;
George Eliot: selected essays, 1989 (editor)
Possession: a romance, 1990
Robert Browning''s Dramatic Monologues, 1990 (editor);
Passions of the Mind, (essays), 1991;
Angels and Insects (novellas),1992
The Matisse Stories (short stories),1993;
The Djinn in the Nightingale''s Eye: five fairy stories, 1994
Imagining Characters, 1995 (joint editor);
New Writing 4, 1995 (joint editor);
Babel Tower, 1996;
New Writing 6, 1997 (joint editor);
The Oxford Book of English Short Stories, 1998 (editor);
Elementals: Stories of fire and ice (short stories), 1998;
The Biographer''s Tale, 2000;
On Histories and Stories (essays), 2000;
Portraits in Fiction, 2001;
The Bird Hand Book, 2001 (Photographs by Victor Schrager Text By AS Byatt);
A Whistling Woman, 2002
Little
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Displaying 1 - 22 of 22 reviews
June 25, 2019
The opening sentence demonstrates this is about being believed - or not
“There were once two little girls who saw, or believed they saw, a thing in a forest.”
This is a magical-realist story, dripping with allusions to fairytales, but the fantastical is contrasted with the grim reality of nearby war.
Image: Girl evacuees in WW2. Source.
Penny and Primrose are opposites in many ways, like Snow White and Rose Red; the wartime absence of signposts makes them feel lost like Hansel and Gretel, even before they enter the forest; the evacuees’ first meal away includes “blood-red jam”, and there’s the eponymous Thing in the forest.
Seeing the Thing changes everything - and nothing: they get on with their lives, but many aspects thereafter can be traced back to that brief event. One is drawn to stories of magic, while the other is no longer “able to inhabit the customary charm and unreality of books” and turns her attention to other unseen forces. Is it a determiner of their fates, almost an unstated curse?
The Power of Words - Said and Unsaid
What’s unstated is a silent undercurrent, pulling the story over the rocky course of two lives, far apart, but forever connected.
Because their mothers didn’t know how to explain the risk of bombs, the girls are unsure if their evacuation is holiday, punishment, or both. Awaiting allocation to families, they don’t discuss their fears because “Words might make some horror solid, in some magical way”. Later, when one father dies, the mother will not discuss her grief, leaving her daughter wanting “a fragment of reality with which to attach herself to the truth of her mother’s pain”. It’s no surprise that neither tells anyone about the Thing, because “who would believe it?”.
Image: Spooky Forest Path. Source.
Belief and the Blurring of Dreams and Reality
• “There are things that are real - more real than we are - but mostly we don’t cross their paths.”
• “The corner of the blanket that covered the unthinkable had been turned back enough for her to catch sight of it.”
• “Each thought that the other was the witness, who made the thing certainly real, who prevented her from slipping into the comfort of believing she had imagined it.”
Byatt at her Best
Byatt is always brilliant at immersing the reader deep in her works, with lush and detailed descriptions of sights, sounds, and smells of fabrics, furniture, decor, and nature. It’s a practical magic. But it is magic. Here, it shifts subtly and powerfully to match the mood and chronology, which switch several times in barely 50 pages. There’s the anxiety and uncertainty, tinged with excitement, of going on a long train journey to a new and unknown destination. The cautious overtures of friendship. The apprehensive thrill of exploring in “the drowsy wood”. The horror of what they see there. The confusion of living with an unfamiliar family, with rules and expectations they don’t yet know. The irresistible pull of revisiting loathly memories. The social awkwardness of unexpected encounters, even in adulthood.
I also like the way there are many (plausible) coincidences and parallels in Penny and Primrose’s lives over the years, but most of them are known to the reader, but not to them.
Quotes
• Evacuees “like a disorderly dwarf regiment”.
• The Thing is “the colour of flayed flesh… Its expression was neither wrath nor greed, but pure misery.”
• “The trees were silent around them, holding out their branches to the sun, breathing noiselessly.”
• “These alien families seemed like dream worlds into which they had strayed, not knowing the physical or social rules.”
• “Close up, in the glass which was both transparent and reflective, their transparent and reflective faces lost detail… and looked both younger and greyer, less substantial.”
• “The light in the woods was more golden and more darkly shadowed than any light on city terraces… The gold and the shadows were intertwined, a promise of liveliness.”
• “Afterwards, if they remembered the evacuation it was as dreams are remembered, with mnemonics designed to claw back what fleets on waking.” Isolated snippets. “They remembered the thing they had seen in the forest, on the contrary, in the way you remember those very few dreams - almost all nightmares - which have the quality of life itself, not of fantasm… In memory, as in such a dream, they felt, I cannot get out, this is a real thing in a real place.”
I was reminded of
* Angela Carter’s collection, The Bloody Chamber, see my review HERE.
* Sarah Perry's The Essex Serpent, see my review HERE.
This story was published in Byatt’s “The Little Black Book of Stories”. See my review HERE for discussion of the shared themes, as well as reviews of the other four stories.
“There were once two little girls who saw, or believed they saw, a thing in a forest.”
This is a magical-realist story, dripping with allusions to fairytales, but the fantastical is contrasted with the grim reality of nearby war.
Image: Girl evacuees in WW2. Source.
Penny and Primrose are opposites in many ways, like Snow White and Rose Red; the wartime absence of signposts makes them feel lost like Hansel and Gretel, even before they enter the forest; the evacuees’ first meal away includes “blood-red jam”, and there’s the eponymous Thing in the forest.
Seeing the Thing changes everything - and nothing: they get on with their lives, but many aspects thereafter can be traced back to that brief event. One is drawn to stories of magic, while the other is no longer “able to inhabit the customary charm and unreality of books” and turns her attention to other unseen forces. Is it a determiner of their fates, almost an unstated curse?
The Power of Words - Said and Unsaid
What’s unstated is a silent undercurrent, pulling the story over the rocky course of two lives, far apart, but forever connected.
Because their mothers didn’t know how to explain the risk of bombs, the girls are unsure if their evacuation is holiday, punishment, or both. Awaiting allocation to families, they don’t discuss their fears because “Words might make some horror solid, in some magical way”. Later, when one father dies, the mother will not discuss her grief, leaving her daughter wanting “a fragment of reality with which to attach herself to the truth of her mother’s pain”. It’s no surprise that neither tells anyone about the Thing, because “who would believe it?”.
Image: Spooky Forest Path. Source.
Belief and the Blurring of Dreams and Reality
• “There are things that are real - more real than we are - but mostly we don’t cross their paths.”
• “The corner of the blanket that covered the unthinkable had been turned back enough for her to catch sight of it.”
• “Each thought that the other was the witness, who made the thing certainly real, who prevented her from slipping into the comfort of believing she had imagined it.”
Byatt at her Best
Byatt is always brilliant at immersing the reader deep in her works, with lush and detailed descriptions of sights, sounds, and smells of fabrics, furniture, decor, and nature. It’s a practical magic. But it is magic. Here, it shifts subtly and powerfully to match the mood and chronology, which switch several times in barely 50 pages. There’s the anxiety and uncertainty, tinged with excitement, of going on a long train journey to a new and unknown destination. The cautious overtures of friendship. The apprehensive thrill of exploring in “the drowsy wood”. The horror of what they see there. The confusion of living with an unfamiliar family, with rules and expectations they don’t yet know. The irresistible pull of revisiting loathly memories. The social awkwardness of unexpected encounters, even in adulthood.
I also like the way there are many (plausible) coincidences and parallels in Penny and Primrose’s lives over the years, but most of them are known to the reader, but not to them.
Quotes
• Evacuees “like a disorderly dwarf regiment”.
• The Thing is “the colour of flayed flesh… Its expression was neither wrath nor greed, but pure misery.”
• “The trees were silent around them, holding out their branches to the sun, breathing noiselessly.”
• “These alien families seemed like dream worlds into which they had strayed, not knowing the physical or social rules.”
• “Close up, in the glass which was both transparent and reflective, their transparent and reflective faces lost detail… and looked both younger and greyer, less substantial.”
• “The light in the woods was more golden and more darkly shadowed than any light on city terraces… The gold and the shadows were intertwined, a promise of liveliness.”
• “Afterwards, if they remembered the evacuation it was as dreams are remembered, with mnemonics designed to claw back what fleets on waking.” Isolated snippets. “They remembered the thing they had seen in the forest, on the contrary, in the way you remember those very few dreams - almost all nightmares - which have the quality of life itself, not of fantasm… In memory, as in such a dream, they felt, I cannot get out, this is a real thing in a real place.”
I was reminded of
* Angela Carter’s collection, The Bloody Chamber, see my review HERE.
* Sarah Perry's The Essex Serpent, see my review HERE.
This story was published in Byatt’s “The Little Black Book of Stories”. See my review HERE for discussion of the shared themes, as well as reviews of the other four stories.
November 11, 2021
There were once two little girls who saw, or believed they saw, a thing in a forest …
Thus begins our dark little fairytale.
Oh, and how tempting is this Forest, with a vivid sense of place, both in it's tangibility as well as it's mystery and meaning.
There were no obvious paths. Dark and light came and went, inviting and mysterious, as the wind pushed clouds across the face of the sun.
The chatter and repeated lilt and alarm of invisible birds, high up, further in. The hum and buzz of insects. Rustling in dry leaves, rushes of movement in thickets. Slitherings, dry coughs, sharp cracks. They went on, pointing out to each other creepers draped with glistening berries, crimson, black and emerald, little crops of toadstools, some scarlet, some ghostly-pale, some a dead-flesh purple, some like tiny parasols...
And now as she wandered on, she saw and recognised them, windflower and bryony, self-heal and dead-nettle, and had—despite where she was—a lovely lapping sense of invisible—just invisible life swarming in the leaves and along the twigs, despite where she was, despite what she had not forgotten having seen there. She closed her eyes a fraction. The sunlight flickered and flickered. She saw glitter and spangling everywhere.
The squirrel stopped to clean its face. She crushed bluebells and saw the sinister hoods of arum lilies.
It was dark now. What was visible had no distinct colour, only shades of ink and elephant.
Quite suddenly, over the tree-tops, a huge disc of white-gold mounted and hung, deepening shadows, silvering edges.
...
Delicious descriptions.
Primrose shrugged voluptuously, let out a gale of a sigh, and rearranged her flesh in her clothes.
...
The perspectives of an older, wiser self, attempting to make sense of the mysteries experiences.
She told herself stories at night about a girl-woman, an enchantress in a fairy wood, loved and protected by an army of wise and gentle animals. She slept banked in by stuffed creatures, as the house in the blitz was banked in by inadequate sandbags.
I think, I think there are things that are real—more real than we are—but mostly we don’t cross their paths, or they don’t cross ours. Maybe at very bad times we get into their world, or notice what they are doing in ours.
The corner of the blanket that covered the unthinkable had been turned back enough for her to catch sight of it. She was in its world.
The face of the Thing hung in her brain, jealously soliciting her attention, distracting her from dailiness.
...
Finally, spare words that, in their context and utterly perfect timing, can reduce to tears:
“Her name was Alys.”
“With a y.”
March 14, 2017
read it for school, but thought that it was actually pretty interesting.
while it is said to be in the genre of fantasy, i would actually prefer to say that it fits the "magical realism" genre much better
while it is said to be in the genre of fantasy, i would actually prefer to say that it fits the "magical realism" genre much better
December 18, 2025
Um conto de fadas sombrio em meio ao Blitz de Londres.
Conhecia o nome A.S. Byatt, mas nem sabia que se tratava de uma autora. Agora, depois de ler, ela ganhou crédito comigo. Consegue dotar uma história cinza, gris, de crianças evacuando uma cidade, sendo enviadas de trem rumo a um interior desconhecido, em uma história fantástica, com tom adequado ao tema, só por meio da perspectiva, pela limitação do ponto de vista das personagens e pela descrição imersa na mente infantil.
É um conto cheio, também, de simbolismos — falando tanto de guerra, de trauma, como também de monstros, de (i)realidade, em uma narrativa circular ("I think, I think there are things that are real —more real than we are — but mostly we don’t cross their paths, or they don’t cross ours. Maybe at very bad times we get into their world, or notice what they are doing in ours). A história que ouvimos é a mesma história que é contada por um dos personagens participantes, a diferença é apenas que o narrador do conto, em terceira pessoa, sabe mais do que o dito personagem que reconta oralmente a história; sabe do que aconteceu de ambos os lados; e quando chegarmos ao final do relato isso vai fazer com que a maneira que ambas as mulheres — antes as meninas fugidas da guerra — decidem lidar com a situação (o encontro com a coisa na floresta) nos coloque a pensar sobre infância, pesadelo, perceptiva e influência das minúcias do passado na vida que escolhemos seguir no presente.
Conhecia o nome A.S. Byatt, mas nem sabia que se tratava de uma autora. Agora, depois de ler, ela ganhou crédito comigo. Consegue dotar uma história cinza, gris, de crianças evacuando uma cidade, sendo enviadas de trem rumo a um interior desconhecido, em uma história fantástica, com tom adequado ao tema, só por meio da perspectiva, pela limitação do ponto de vista das personagens e pela descrição imersa na mente infantil.
É um conto cheio, também, de simbolismos — falando tanto de guerra, de trauma, como também de monstros, de (i)realidade, em uma narrativa circular ("I think, I think there are things that are real —more real than we are — but mostly we don’t cross their paths, or they don’t cross ours. Maybe at very bad times we get into their world, or notice what they are doing in ours). A história que ouvimos é a mesma história que é contada por um dos personagens participantes, a diferença é apenas que o narrador do conto, em terceira pessoa, sabe mais do que o dito personagem que reconta oralmente a história; sabe do que aconteceu de ambos os lados; e quando chegarmos ao final do relato isso vai fazer com que a maneira que ambas as mulheres — antes as meninas fugidas da guerra — decidem lidar com a situação (o encontro com a coisa na floresta) nos coloque a pensar sobre infância, pesadelo, perceptiva e influência das minúcias do passado na vida que escolhemos seguir no presente.
December 16, 2025
Melancholic Mystery Horror that embodies how War Makes innocent Children Sufferer
These story of AS Byatt starts with the depiction of a train journey that was taking a group of children to a safe place. That safe place was situated in a place surrounded by jungles. Two female girls witnessed something beastial that haunted them for whole life. These two girls was once introduced with a lovely female child who was younger than them. However, that girl was suddenly vanished from their camp. What happened to her? Did that beastial figure take her away? Or she was not real? You would not find the answers but you will get a melancholic feeling while indulging yourself in this mystery.
The blendation of mystery, melancholy and countering trauma made this story a tremendous piece of literature
Ehasan Ahmed Khan
Dhaka, Bangladesh
Date: 16 December,2025
These story of AS Byatt starts with the depiction of a train journey that was taking a group of children to a safe place. That safe place was situated in a place surrounded by jungles. Two female girls witnessed something beastial that haunted them for whole life. These two girls was once introduced with a lovely female child who was younger than them. However, that girl was suddenly vanished from their camp. What happened to her? Did that beastial figure take her away? Or she was not real? You would not find the answers but you will get a melancholic feeling while indulging yourself in this mystery.
The blendation of mystery, melancholy and countering trauma made this story a tremendous piece of literature
Ehasan Ahmed Khan
Dhaka, Bangladesh
Date: 16 December,2025
December 3, 2017
I read this short story for my AP English class. A very enticing, spooky tale, wonderfully descriptive and intriguing. I definitely appreciated the symbolism and metaphors, telling a tale of innocence lost through tragic events.
January 14, 2021
Re rara la historia...
2⭐️
2⭐️
February 3, 2021
I enjoyed this short story. It was interesting to read about two little girls who saw something in the woods and then learn how this experience impacted their adult lives.
October 11, 2021
3.5/5
June 16, 2022
4 STARS
January 13, 2024
i really wasnt into the prose for this, felt ALMOST rhythmic but not quite. enjoyed the character parallels and things tho 👍 just not for me
May 6, 2024
author portrayed the children's war PTSD symbolism really well!
September 22, 2024
Amazing!
June 11, 2025
i deeply enjoyed this. read it for class and found myself really invested in these two girls, now women. beautiful ending!!
January 17, 2026
3.5 - for class
March 12, 2025
3.5/5 ⭐
September 17, 2016
This short story was collected in an anthology for college course use. I tried it to challenge my students and was really thrilled because many took the challenge.
The setting is not familiar to the young people in Taipei; however, the sense of guilt portrayed in the story is so universal that we can merely treat it as a metaphor.
I am glad my students, at least those ambitious ones, are willing to admit that "IT" exists.
The setting is not familiar to the young people in Taipei; however, the sense of guilt portrayed in the story is so universal that we can merely treat it as a metaphor.
I am glad my students, at least those ambitious ones, are willing to admit that "IT" exists.
September 26, 2023
Really enjoyed this one. I loved the contrast between Penny and Primrose and how they dealt with their experience. I also feel that there was just the right amount of open-endedness. Enough is left to interpretation for each reader to make the story their own, but the characters are fleshed out and the events in the story feel meaningful.
February 15, 2018
I really enjoyed this short story. It was very different and had what I felt was a lot of emotions under the surface. I felt connected to the characters and liked the descriptions given through out, very detailed but in a good way.
April 12, 2016
I liked this- but I'm not sure I understood it yet. Gorgeous imagery!
January 7, 2021
Dos niñas, un bosque oscuro y una cosa que habita en él y que reptará en sus vidas y en su memoria sin descanso. San Jorge y el dragón se enfrentan en lo más profundo de la culpa y el alma humana.
May 3, 2017
Ains... que regustillo gótico te deja! <3
Displaying 1 - 22 of 22 reviews