Liz Moore on ‘The God of the Woods’

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A summer camp in the Adirondacks. A rich girl gone missing, 14 years after her older brother also disappeared. A prominent local family harboring dark secrets. Liz Moore’s new novel, “The God in the Woods,” turns these elements into a complex and suspenseful meditation on parenting and social class and the rituals of summer friendship: “Those of us with fond memories of summer camp,” Kate Tuttle wrote in her review for us, “will recognize the way campers enter into intense relationships, test themselves against childhood fears and begin to grow into who they’ll become.”

On this week’s podcast, Liz Moore chats with Gilbert Cruz about “The God in the Woods” and discusses, among other things, how she plots a mystery without an outline. “Every time I write, I convince myself that I can’t possibly stick the landing and that I’ve written myself into a corner,” Moore says. “But the only constant that I take from novel to novel is that I always have that feeling at various times, and that I can go back to the most recent fork in the road and just take the other fork for a while. Usually that leads me to some other path that feels better.”

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