A missing child, a summer camp and a serial killer fuel Liz Moore’s ‘God of the Woods’

At Camp Emerson, a girl has gone missing. 

And the missing girl, Barbara Van Laar, is not just any camper, but the daughter of the wealthy family that owns the camp, a family that had already endured tragedy more than a decade earlier when their young son disappeared, never to be found.  

The set-up for “The God of the Woods” may sound like another woman-in-peril thriller. However, while Liz Moore’s novel, which is set in 1975 with flashbacks to 1961, is definitely twisty and exciting, it’s also an examination of class and privilege and the way those with money wield it as a weapon and “generally become most enraged when they sense they’re about to be held accountable for their wrongs.”

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More notably, it captures the intense adolescent energy and bonding experience of camp while being a beautifully rendered character study of a half-dozen girls and women as they struggle to find their identity in a world filled with men content to or intent on seeing them disempowered. 

Moore, whose previous books include “Heft” and “The Long Bright River,” offers the perspectives of multiple characters: Louise, the counselor responsible for the missing Barbara who suddenly sees her future crashing before her eyes; Tracy, Barbara’s shy bunkmate; Alice, Barbara’s distant and doped-up mother; Judy, the pioneering female investigator on the case; and even a serial killer who has escaped from prison.

Moore arrived a little late for our video interview because she had just gotten a call that the book was the week’s indie bookstore bestseller in the country. 

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“Nothing like that has ever happened,” says Moore, who is also working as co-creator and executive producer of a streaming adaptation of “Long Bright River” and who hopes to have a similar opportunity with “The God of the Woods.”

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Q. Where did the idea for this come from?

I have a long family history in the Adirondacks so the atmosphere of the place and my sense memories were my first inspirations. Then I was at a writing residency in the Adirondacks at Yaddo and I went down a rabbit hole of exploring the history of the Trask family who founded it – they endured the loss of four children and I was absolutely devastated for this family while also aware of how much power and capital they’d had. That contrast really sparked something for me. Plus, I knew the story of Robert Garrow, a serial killer in the Adirondacks. It was told a lot in our family, like a ghost story. There were two separate manhunts for him and he had so much knowledge of the woods, because he was raised there and had to be well-versed in things like fishing and trapping and hunting and hiding.

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Q. Which character were you most connected to and how do you deal with those feelings while protecting the narrative’s integrity?

Tracy’s perspective is maybe the closest to my own in feeling like an outsider. I only went to camp for two summers. It was a terrific camp, but I was not cut out for summer camp socially. 

But it feels like some characters have more resources than others, and Louise seems to be in the most immediate danger. She has a lot of forces working against her and she is stuck in the situation she’s in by virtue of wanting to protect her little brother from their mother. And so she makes choices that aren’t great for her.

Q. At one point, Barbara’s mother Judy wonders whether the girls she knew in high school would have been as brave as Louise and Barbara, but then she thinks, “But it’s 1975 now. The world has changed.” How much had it changed in the previous decade and is that line designed to make the readers think about how much or how little things have changed for girls in the last fifty years?

A lot was changing in 1975 around women’s rights, and the feminist movement was in full swing. But there was a little bit of sadness in my mind when I wrote that, thinking about the way the world still underprotects girls and women in 2024. So there’s truth to her statement, but there’s also a bit of pathos.

Q. How much of that lack of protection today is specific to class?

Income inequality has only grown since 1975 so the characters who were underresourced might be even more so today. I was interested in exploring how women can be disempowered across every class and every axis of society. And it was interesting to do that from a narrative standpoint, so even Alice, who comes from the upper class is disempowered at the hands of the men within her class.

Q. I felt bad for Alice, who lost her son and was controlled by her husband but she keeps the world and us at a remove. Plus, people need to take responsibility for their actions. Was it challenging to show readers what shaped her without excusing her?

Alice is an example of an adult who has never processed the trauma they faced in their childhood. Alice was sort of married off at 17 in what amounted to a transaction between two wealthy families. And she’s never really self-actualized. And yes, it is incumbent upon adults at a certain point to own their actions. But I do think the landscape was much different in 1975 than it is today – she would’ve had fewer examples of women who pursued therapeutic intervention, for example. But a lot of her actions are despicable and she treats her staff and her own daughter very poorly so I’m not interested in fully letting her off the hook.

Q. Why did you write from so many different characters’ perspectives and why didn’t Barbara and the camp director, TJ, get their own chapters?

This novel ended up feeling like a panopticon, like everybody is looking at everybody else. I wanted the reader to view every character through the eyes of every other character, learning new things about them from these different perspectives. There were characters whose points of view I experimented with and ultimately decided that I either couldn’t write them in a way that felt authentic, or, as with TJ, that it would undermine the narrative or reveal something too soon.

Q. For all the class and gender issues and the rich character arcs, the book is definitely a page-turner filled with suspense. How conscious are you of pacing and plot as you write or edit?

This is my fifth novel and I am growing increasingly aware of it. I went to an MFA program in the first decade of the millennium and felt like there was almost an aversion to openly thinking about story or plot. That affected me and the writing of my first few novels. But today I think of it as important an art form as character development or atmosphere, things more typically associated with literary fiction. I think the human urge to tell good stories is ancient, and I now actively strive for that while writing.