The Butcher of the Forest is a 2024 dark fantasy novella by Premee Mohamed. It was first published by Tordotcom.
A brutal tyrant orders Veris Thorn — the only person to have ever successfully rescued anyone from the haunted Elmever forest — to return to the Elmever and rescue his two small children before 24 hours pass and they are trapped forever.
The Butcher of the Forest won the 2025 Aurora Award for Best Novelette/Novella, [1] and was a finalist for the 2025 Hugo Award for Best Novella [2] and the Nebula Award for Best Novella of 2024. [3]
In Locus , Liz Burke called it "compelling and effective" and stated that it is "not horror, not quite", because "hope is never quite denied". Burke praised it as having "layers, and depth, and feeling", and lauded Mohamed's "lucid prose [which] convey[s] more by Veris's reaction to her encounters than by plain description"; however, Burke also found that the parallels Mohamed drew between the "arbitrary powers" of the tyrant, and those of the supernatural entities within the Elmever, were "perhaps a little heavy-handed." [4]
Gary K. Wolfe observed that the Tyrant's lack of a name reinforced the story's "archetypal tone", and described Veris as "an increasingly intriguing figure", whose choices regarding the children of the man who murdered her family give the narrative a "surprisingly rich and complex texture." [5]
James Nicoll called the novella "very efficient" and "an entertaining sequence of increasing disquieting encounters, accompanied by increasingly tragic revelations", and declared that although it "is not long", it is "as long as it needs to be." [6] Publishers Weekly , conversely, faulted it for its "page count [which] doesn't leave much room for character development", but nonetheless conceded that "it's easy to buy into the high stakes" and that "readers will be rapt". [7]
Writing in Strange Horizons , Dan Hartland stated that "compared with [the Tyrant's] throne room, the woods and its denizens seem so… manageable", and noted the novella's unusual structure, such that "it begins with its most considered scene, its most fully imagined setting; its exploration of the forest is attenuated and withheld; and its quest [the discovery of the children and their liberation from the forest's magic] is complete by its halfway point". Hartland considered that fatalism is a central theme of the novella, in that even if Veris is able to retrieve the children from the forest, this "isn't any sort of freedom". [8]
Mohamed has said that the novella was the result of her having dreamed of "the throne room with all the skulls on the stone wall, and then someone saying something about how the children were innocent of the sins of their father". [9]