The Woods is set in the fictional town of Feral, West Virginia, a rural community with a modest population. Tad Surrey is the middle child of the family, sandwiched between older brother Casey and younger sister Daisy. Casey is athletic and popular, while Daisy is intelligent but withdrawn, possessing artistic tendencies but virtually no desire for social interaction with her peers. She lives away from the rest of the family, cloistered in the attic of the farmhouse in which they live. Tad himself is also a loner, finding most in common with his younger sister, and choosing to spend much of his time playing solitary games of his own invention in the woods on and around the Surrey property.
It is deep in the woods where Tad feels himself inexplicably drawn one day, pulled like a magnet to a certain spot, far off the beaten paths with which he is familiar. There, he encounters a fancifully dressed man who calls himself Daddy, speaks in riddles, and whose very existence becomes a mystery into which Tad is drawn, sometimes against his will, sometimes with an eagerness that frightens and perplexes him. From this first meeting between these two very dissident minds and lifestyles, a complex chain of events starts to unravel, beginning with a cautious, hesitant friendship, and ending in discordance that could very well rip the Surrey family apart at the seams. Along the way, there is somnambulism, magic, a party of legendarily epic scope, and a mystery going back over fifty years. Who is Daddy, and how did he and his friend Stitch come to be living in the decaying mansion in the woods? That is the question that Tad must answer, if he is ever to have a hope of a normal life again.
The Woods is at its core a novel about what ties a family together. It is about the challenge to that family by an outside influence, and it is about the collision of worlds and world views that are so fundamentally different that they were never meant to touch on one another. It is about whether the bonds of that family will prove strong enough to draw them together against adversity, in the face of this lurking, unknown threat. The protagonist, Tad Surrey, is at a crucial time in his life, on the cusp between innocence and experience, but what he may end up experiencing, if things are not put right, could very well be the end of him.