Beneath the Trees Where Nobody Sees

On her morning walk to work, a brown bear named Samantha greets every one of her adorably folksy anthropomorphic animal friends and neighbors with genuine warmth, which they return wholeheartedly. The hardware store she runs is a sort of unofficial town hall of Woodbrook, an idyllic hamlet Samantha describes as “a place that appreciates a lemonade in the summer and spiced cider in the fall…a cozy fire in the winter and a fresh breeze after the first rain of spring. A place where you can deal with the day on your own time, floating on the scent of cedar, rosemary, and clover.” The only thing Samantha loves more than her hometown is taking a drive up to the city, luring an unsuspecting victim into her car, and bringing them out into the woods to murder them so gruesomely that even the most hardened hardcore horror readers might find themselves shaken.