The Darkest Part of the Forest

The Darkest Part of the Forest is a young adult fantasy novel by the American writer Holly Black, published in 2015.

The town in the book has made its arrangements with the faeries who live beside it: certain things are not said, certain doors are not opened, and the children are warned about what happens at night. Hazel and Ben grew up inside that bargain, with a mother who was changed by the forest and a childhood spent playing at being the knight and the bard, and the novel is honest about the difference between the stories children tell themselves and the prices the forest actually charges. Black writes the town's teenagers as competent at the rules of the bargain and bad at the parts of it that nobody has stated, which is where the menace comes from. Ben has a gift for music that the faeries want, Hazel has a secret about a bargain she made years earlier, and the sleeping prince in the glass coffin turns out to have his own grievances about the town that has been living beside him. The book is a standalone, though characters from Black's earlier Modern Tale of Faerie trilogy appear in it, and it shares a world with the later Folk of the Air series.