Into the Forest: Tales of the Baba Yaga (Paperback or Softback)

Teeth gnash. Bones rattle. The forest waits.

Deep in the forest, behind a fence crowned with skulls, an old woman waits in a cottage perched on birds’ legs. She is witch and grandmother, helper and devourer, giver of life and bringer of death. For centuries, Baba Yaga has embodied the contradictions women are taught to fear: age and appetite, wisdom and wickedness, nurture and rage. She is wild, she is woman, she is witch―and somewhere beneath our own skin, we recognize her.

From the oldest Slavic folktales to the witches and wicked women who haunt contemporary horror, Baba Yaga has never fit neatly into the role of villain. Sometimes she tests us. Sometimes she feeds us. Sometimes she eats us whole. Maiden, Mother, Crone―her stories remind us that feminine power does not have to be beautiful, benevolent, or easily understood. The deeper we wander into her woods, the closer we come to the parts of ourselves we have been warned not to become.

In a world still eager to fear women who grow older, angrier, hungrier, and harder to tame, INTO THE FOREST returns to Baba Yaga’s domain to reclaim the witch in the woods. Here, women of contemporary horror gather the guts and bones of old stories and make them strange again, following the crooked path toward transformation, retribution, and the terrible freedom of becoming something other than what the world expects. 

From editor Lindy Ryan comes INTO THE FOREST, an anthology from women of contemporary horror who venture deep into the woods to reimagine one of folklore’s most enduring―and devouring―women. Featuring Gwendolyn Kiste, Stephanie M. Wytovich, Mercedes M. Yardley, Monique Snyman, Donna Lynch, Lisa Quigley, R. J. Joseph, and many more, with an introduction by Christina Henry.

Lindy Ryan is an award-winning author, anthologist, and short-film director whose books and anthologies have received starred reviews from Publishers Weekly, Booklist and Library Journal. Several of her projects have been adapted for screen. ?Ryan is the current author-in-residence at Rue Morgue. Declared a “ champion for women’ s voices in horror” by Shelf Awareness, Ryan was named a Publishers Weekly Star Watch Honoree in 2020, and in 2022, was named one of horror's most masterful anthology curators. ?She previously served on the Board of Directors for the Independent Book Publishers Association (IBPA).