{"id":58672,"date":"2026-03-04T08:00:23","date_gmt":"2026-03-04T13:00:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/strangehorizons.com\/wordpress\/?p=58672"},"modified":"2026-03-04T21:24:06","modified_gmt":"2026-03-05T02:24:06","slug":"into-the-midnight-wood-by-alexandra-mccollum","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/strangehorizons.com\/wordpress\/non-fiction\/into-the-midnight-wood-by-alexandra-mccollum\/","title":{"rendered":"Into the Midnight Wood by Alexandra McCollum"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Into<\/a>The best thing about Alexandra McCollum\u2019s Into the Midnight Wood<\/em> is that its protagonist and his love interest are both very irritating people. As a society, I fear we\u2019ve forgotten that romance works best when there\u2019s friction between the two leads. I don\u2019t mean they have to be bickering constantly, or that there needs to be some carefully contrived plot conflict to drive them apart in the third act. I mean that when two people\u2014of different upbringing and character, with different schedules and life goals and conversation styles\u2014attempt to bring their lives together, things do not go swimmingly every moment of every day. People have weird, annoying little habits. We eat at different times from each other. We have different relationships to punctuality. We clash into each other\u2019s sensitive spots before we have learned where they are found. The connection point of a happy ending feels good because it resolves the points of disconnection that came before.<\/p>\n

I have found this problem fairly endemic to the romcomantasy (eh? eh?) subgenre to which McCollum\u2019s debut belongs. Oh, I am so tired of reading book after book where nobody has ever done a single thing wrong, or, even if they have, it was all a terrible misunderstanding. I cannot bear these characters with personalities as smooth as Ken dolls, who run dear little retail shops in interchangeable Fantasylands and placeless middle Americas, unbothered by problems of inventory or human frailty. I am going to chew right through the bars of my enclosure, and go rampaging all around the countryside, if I am called upon to read one more book where a character\u2019s big secret finally comes out, and the other character is like: \u201cNo problem, babe, I know your heart, and I understand that, while you initially had a scheme to sabotage my dreams, you changed your mind over the course of our courtship. Due to the trust we have built together, I understand this perfectly without your having to explain it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Not once more. If I read this sort of thing again, down will come the power lines. To the incinerator with the paper stores. The printing presses I will break like the Luddites of old. Chomp will go my teeth upon the spindly fingers of the TikTok tastemakers or whoever\u2019s responsible for this. A romance is just so much more interesting if the two love interests have personality traits \u2026 I was going to finish this sentence with something like \u201cthat don\u2019t mesh perfectly without effort,\u201d but really I will just let the sentence end at \u201ctraits.\u201d A romance is much more interesting if the two love interests are recognizable as alive human people. I would like us to get back to that, please.<\/p>\n

David, the protagonist of Into the Midnight Wood<\/em> (and this is a single-POV romance, refreshing in this era of dual-POV supremacy), has been living with, and frustrated by, his hot chaotic roommate Meredith for five years. And I would also be annoyed with Meredith: Meredith sleeps with all their third roommates so it\u2019s a revolving door of third roommates; he leaves mugs and glitter all over. He wanders into the dangerous magical woods at the edge of their property and gathers herbs and chats to the Midnight Mice with very little regard for the possibly sinister forces that lurk in the forest. You may argue that Meredith is a manic pixie dream girl, and I shan\u2019t disagree with you, but McCollum is not shying away from the real material conditions of living with someone like this. Mugs. Mugs everywhere! Never the trash taken out or the dishes done! Meredith I would kick twice, sharply, in the shins.<\/p>\n

David is also kind of the worst. He\u2019s that difficult combination of judgmental and resistant to change that means he\u2019s constantly complaining to himself about circumstances he has every ability to alter should he so choose. He\u2019s gotten into a habit of tossing not-very-nice banter at Meredith. He gets so locked in to a given life goal (getting a promotion at work) that he lets himself lose track of the emotions of the people around him. On a day when he was not wearing a button-up and couldn\u2019t fact-check me, I would say to David, \u201cWhy do you always have one of the middle buttons on your shirt askew? Is that a fashion thing?\u201d; and then he would be stressed about his button-up shirts forever afterwards.<\/p>\n

Is this a good book? I don\u2019t know. What even does it mean to be good? The fantasy elements could be more clearly delineated. Non-humans live and conduct their business alongside humans, but this seems not to have materially affected geopolitical history, since Wales and Appalachia still exist. David and Meredith live on the edge of the Midnight Wood, a magic forest where time and space don\u2019t follow the usual rules. I found its parameters and personal relationship to Meredith confusing, but possibly in that way common when the author has several further books in mind, perhaps ones that will feature Meredith becoming ever more powerful and unearthly at the periphery of other people\u2019s love stories. (I would endorse this, by the way. [This would rule.]) But within the confines of this<\/em> one book, I couldn\u2019t tell you with a gun to my head what purpose, for example, the Midnight Mice serve in maintaining the forward march of time.<\/p>\n

I can say with certainty, though, that I did not welcome the return of the implied-Black best friend (Meredith\u2019s) who punctuates more of his sentences with the words \u201cyou feel me?\u201d than is strictly natural. He\u2019s there mainly to be protective of Meredith. This is, I admit, the mandated role of the best friend in a romance novel, but the author\u2019s discomfort with writing a Black character is so palpable that you wish they\u2019d just not bothered. I can\u2019t propose a fix for this\u2014it\u2019s weird when white authors populate books with only-white characters, and quite often, as here, it\u2019s weird when they very uncomfortably don\u2019t. (The ideal solution would be to address the problem at the root by eliminating white supremacy, but I suppose that\u2019s beyond the scope of this book review.)<\/p>\n

Into the Midnight Wood<\/em> is good, at least, in its ability to supply the chief thing I care about from a romance: a pair of characters trying to get their emotional houses in good enough order to be in love with each other. Like everyone, like all of us, they are both a little bit terrible. I am so starved in general for romance protagonists who are a little bit terrible that I did not care that the specifics of David and Meredith\u2019s story arc were heavy-handed. One of the novel\u2019s precipitating events, for instance, is that a psychic gives Meredith a charm to reveal hidden things, which means that he gets less good at concealing his depression and self-worth issues from David. Elsewhere, the reasons why David and Meredith end up hosting an event for Meredith\u2019s terrible family, giving David a front-row seat to how these jackasses treat him, are contrived. And you know what? I don\u2019t care. Great. I love it. Gimme.<\/p>\n

Likewise, McCollum is stellar at writing conversations in which the leads are plausibly, but consistently, misunderstanding each other. It\u2019s one of the harder stunts for a romance novel to pull off, because the failure mode leaves readers complaining that the whole conflict could have been resolved or avoided if the characters had just had one single conversation with each other. David and Meredith can\u2019t stop<\/em> having conversations. It\u2019s just that they\u2019re not hearing what the other person is telling them. Here\u2019s their discussion right after the first time they have sex, about midway through the book:<\/p>\n

David stood abruptly. \u201cYou forgot to give me the speech, you know,\u201d he remarked as he pulled his boxers back on.<\/p>\n

Slowly, Meredith got to his feet. \u201cDavid, I\u2014\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cNo, no, it\u2019s all right,\u201d David forestalled him. \u201cI know it by heart: I\u2019m not in love with you. I\u2019ve got no plans to fall in love with you and this isn\u2019t going to change that, and it\u2019s all right if that means you\u2019d rather not do anything.<\/em>\u201d Even if it was a bit late for that last part now \u2026 \u201cAs you said, the two of us together\u2014could you even imagine? The very idea is absurd.\u201d[\u2026]<\/p>\n

After a silence that lasted a beat too long, Meredith gave a lopsided smile. \u201cYeah,\u201d he said. \u201cOf course it\u2019d never work, would it? You and me, we\u2019d be at each other\u2019s throats every minute. S\u2019pose you\u2019ll be wanting the shower? You can go first, I\u2019ll put the kettle on.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This works because McCollum has set this up from the beginning. We\u2019re well<\/em> aware that Meredith always gives this little speech to people he sleeps with, because it\u2019s a conflict that comes up in the book\u2019s very first scene. So I don\u2019t need much persuading that David would think of himself as the latest in a long line of sexual conquests, and that Meredith would take this little speech to mean that David doesn\u2019t want him. It\u2019s good! It\u2019s elegant! This is the content the people (me) desire!<\/p>\n

I also deeply appreciated the book\u2019s casual resistance to tidy (boring) scripts around sex and gender. Meredith wears dresses and sparkly clothes and flower tiaras, and there\u2019s a running gag that he\u2019s allergic to labeling himself as one thing or another. David takes a moment for a pronoun check about midway through the book, which I really loved. It\u2019s rare to read about two characters with years of familiarity between them checking in about pronouns, outside of the context of a coming-out story. When they have penetrative sex, they also have a quick check-in about who will be doing what, ruffling David\u2019s instinctive assumption that they both mutually understand he\u2019d be topping. Here again, the warmth of my positive response may owe less to what this book is doing, and more to what other books are not. It felt really refreshing to be reminded that even quite compatible people can\u2019t read each other\u2019s minds or magically intuit each other\u2019s preferences. Having these conversations is what building intimacy looks like.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m going to say something now that will sound like an insult; but walk with me, because it will turn out to be a very high compliment, albeit current trends in publishing will be catching some strays along the way. Into the Midnight Wood<\/em> is not for everyone. You could say that Meredith is too twee, that David spends too much time being a jerk and not enough time redeeming himself, that it\u2019s aggravating when these two characters won\u2019t just talk about their feelings. I would know what you meant. I wouldn\u2019t argue. But Into the Midnight Wood<\/em> feels like the book the author wanted to write. <\/em>I didn\u2019t, perhaps, realize until I was midway through it how badly I\u2019ve needed that.<\/p>\n

So<\/em> many of the books in the cozy romantasy space (I know I said romcomantasy before, but I\u2019ve lost the courage of my convictions since then) feel like cynical marketing strategies between two covers, books that endeavor to capture the largest readership by making their plots and their characters as anodyne as possible. I crave books with enough specificity that I can say they are not for everyone; the alternative, I think, is books that are not for anyone. <\/em>Books that are, essentially, for the algorithm.<\/p>\n

Real people are annoying, and you may carve that on my tombstone. Alexandra McCollum need not visit my grave to learn this truth. Refreshingly, they already know.<\/p>\n
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I know I said romcomantasy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26,"featured_media":58673,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-58672","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-non-fiction","category-reviews"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/strangehorizons.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/intothemidnightwoodcover.jpg?fit=973%2C1500&ssl=1","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p82q22-fgk","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/strangehorizons.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58672","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/strangehorizons.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/strangehorizons.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/strangehorizons.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/26"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/strangehorizons.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=58672"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/strangehorizons.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58672\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":58754,"href":"https:\/\/strangehorizons.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58672\/revisions\/58754"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/strangehorizons.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/58673"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/strangehorizons.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=58672"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/strangehorizons.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=58672"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/strangehorizons.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=58672"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}