The Darkest Part of the Forest is a 2015 young adult fantasy novel by Holly Black. It is a standalone story set in the Modern Faerie Tales and The Folk of the Air universe.
In a small town where humans coexist with mythical creatures, teenage Hazel and her older brother Ben are both in love with a mysterious horned boy who sleeps in a glass coffin in the nearby woods.
Tropes:
- Adults Are Useless: Nearly every adult character is completely useless at best and a jerkass at worst. The Evans' don't even bother questioning how Hazel and Ben got mixed up with the horned boy, and the adults at the town meeting are more than happy to sell Jack up the river. Only the Gordon parents try to defend their children at all, but they are woefully ineffective in the face of Sorrow, the monster from the woods.
- Alternate Identity Amnesia: Hazel has no memory of her time as the Alderking's knight.
- Anguished Declaration of Love: Severin gives one to Ben when it looks like Severin is about to die, and he dramatically confesses his love in front of the entire faerie court.
- Big Brother Instinct: Both of the Evans' siblings have this towards each other. Ben is the actual older brother and wants to protect Hazel. However, Hazel is the more aggressive and warlike one and wants to protect him. Much of the conflict between the two arises from their mutual desire to hide dangerous secrets to protect the other.
- Big Eater: Jack, constantly, as some part of his fey nature. He'll eat entire loaves of bread and gallons of milk, swallow whole eggs at the grocery store, and if he's too embarrassed to ask for 5th helpings of dinner, he'll eat cotton balls soaked in water.
- Blue-and-Orange Morality: The Fair Folk have no qualms about murdering tourists visiting the local town of Fairfold in gruesome ways, or else kidnapping human babies and replacing them with their own i.e. changelings, for unknown reasons; other nasty habits of theirs throughout the book include cursing locals, or in the case of Ben, being "blessed" with a gift for fairy music that ends up backfiring on him when he grew older. To them, humans are basically ants and as such they feel they have the liberty to do whatever they like to them, which on a lucky day will mean all the milk in the house spoiling and in some of the worst cases being turned into a pile of rocks with the only way of breaking the curse being another human being recognizes that the "rocks" are actually a person (or people) under a spell.
- Changeling Tale: Jack Gordon and Carter Gordon, with a twist: originally, the human baby Carter was stolen by the Folk with the faerie infant, Jack, left in his place. However, Carter's mother, being Genre Savvy, burned Jack with iron, causing his faerie mother to return with Carter. However, Carter's mother not only took Carter back, but refused to return Jack, saying that since his mother had traded him away, she'd lost all right to him. Jack and Carter are then raised as twin brothers.
- Cursed with Awesome:
- When Ben was a baby, his mother painted a picture for a fey woman, who "rewarded" Ben with the ability to play faerie music and forever be drawn to it— whether he likes it or not. The woman specifically states that the fascination will plague him and change him for the rest of his life, and if he were to try and abstain from his gift, it would continue to torment him. While his music does things like incapacitate monsters so that his sister can kill them, it also does things like give his music instructors heart attacks if he plays while angry.
- Jack is a faerie, with all the magic that comes with it. Unfortunately, he lives in a town where locals are well aware of faeries and the protections needed against them. Living in Fairfield, surrounded by iron and Saint John's Wort and people who carry grave dust and dried holly berries and protective amulets on their persons is physically uncomfortable at best.
- Exact Words: Hazel makes a bargain with the faeries in exchange for seven years of her life. She assumes they'll shave those years off her lifespan, but they never said anything about killing her. Instead they own her for seven years worth of servitude.
- The Fair Folk: the Folk live in the woods, ruled by the cruel Alderking. The folk themselves are the more traditional sort of fey, who run on Blue-and-Orange Morality and whose members aren't above murdering tourists, eating children, and cursing people.
- Free-Range Children: Due to Parental Neglect, Hazel and Ben spent their childhood running around town and the faerie-infested woods.
- Magic Music: Ben was Cursed with Awesome with the ability to play faerie music. The music, beguiling to humans, is equally effective in enthralling creatures of Faerie, and he and his sister use it to hunt down monsters.
- Missing Time: Hazel's first clue that something has gone wrong is when she finds her boots covered in mud and her window left open, with no memory of how that happened. Later, she finds out that she's been in service to the Alderking as one of his knights for several years. Normally, her night-self cleans up so her day-self won't know anything is amiss.
- My God, What Have I Done?: Ben, after nearly killing his teacher with his music on accident. He's so upset that he smashes his hand, repeatedly, breaking numerous bones before swearing off music entirely."It has to stop. I have to stop. Somebody has to stop me."
- Parental Neglect: Hazel and Ben's parents are both Eccentric Artists are too caught up in their art to care for their kids, especially when they were small children. The book describes them as having raised Ben and Hazel with the same "benign neglect" that they have for their cats, which includes feeding them table scraps and letting them eat dog food, not getting them clothing, letting them run in the woods (where the parents know dangerous beings hang out), and otherwise ignoring them. They get better in time, bust still remain mostly oblivious to their children's well being.
- Poor Communication Kills: A lot of the interpersonal drama between characters comes from the characters keeping secrets from one another, most notably Hazel not telling Ben that she made a deal with the Alderking for his scholarship.
- Power Incontinence: Why Ben and Hazel had to stop fighting monsters initially; Ben had trouble controlling his music. Later, when playing music while upset, he gave one of his teachers a heart attack that nearly killed her, which was what got him to stop playing entirely.
- Stop Hitting Yourself: In the past, Jack magically compelled a bully to punch himself until he broke his own nose.
- Tagline: "Fairies. Knights. Princes. True Love. Think you know how the story goes? Think again..."
- Urban Fantasy: The book is set in a modern town that borders on faerie lands.
- The X of Y
