A man decides he is old enough. A woman returns early from a lovers' retreat to a bottle of pills at home. And how should you explain the nuances of contemporary Paris to your mother, twenty – five years dead? Valérie Mr éjen 's Black Forest is a book of mourning that isn ' t morbid or sentimental, but rather an elegant and wryly humorous brace against the void. With a paradoxically detached intimacy, Mr éjen follows death's dark and twisted path through the lives it touches, wringing out every possible meaning—or non–meaning— along the way. A writer at the height of her career who draws comparisons to Georges Perec and Nathalie Sarraute, Mr éjen has cemented her status as an auteur with a singular voice, guiding us through the Black Forest of ghosts that populate her subconscious.

Monty is nineteen, the eldest son on the family farm. They live near the edge of the Dromm woods, infamous for its black, leafless trees. Some say it's cursed; others laugh at the thought. Monty doesn't believe in any of that. He just wants to take care of his family, carry on his father's legacy, and one day, get off the farm and do something bigger. But when Terra disappears one night and Monty finds her unconscious among the black trees, things start to change. She's acting odd. He swears Terra to secrecy, knowing that if anyone found out, their farm would be ruined. Even their mother can't know. And now people in town are dying. One by one. Mysterious and awful deaths, leaving the corpses withered and rotten. The townspeople fear a plague, but Monty suspects something far worse. That the stories are true. That the black forest is cursed, and with each death, the evil taking their lives is growing stronger. Something has escaped the black forest. Something that wants to kill them all. And time is running out.

Things have been pretty bleak for fifteen-year-old, Jack Larson since the day his father walked out the door and never returned. The cops think he abandoned his family to start a new life, but Jack refuses to believe it. Now, almost two years later, Jack is stagnating in his drug-ridden mountain town-spending his days in a haze of pot smoke, playing video games with his best friend Cash. Jack feels like he'll never get an answer regarding his dad's disappearance when he stumbles upon information that changes everything. Jack and Cash follow clues that lead them to the infamous Black Forest Inn where they make an unbelievable discovery - one that puts them on a collision course with a gang of white supremacists who will stop at nothing to keep the dark secret buried.