Should your novel include a table of contents?

Let’s first discuss genre so you understand where this book is positioned before you decide whether and how to use Liz Moore’s tools in your own work. I’ve labeled The God of the Woods a “literary mystery.” The author herself has used the term “mystery” to describe her work, and her publisher uses “literary fiction” as its primary label. The novel, which is approximately 119,000 words, is much longer than typical mysteries, which generally run between 70,000 and 90,000 words. Moore uses the plot conventions, tropes, and pacing typical of mysteries, but her close attention to character, her exploration of multiple complex themes, and her rich, textured prose are more typical of literary fiction.

This specific combination of qualities—elevated style and complex themes with a strong plot—is often labeled upmarket fiction or book club fiction, an umbrella term that can be applied to novels from many genres. The God of the Woods was a Read with Jenna pick, which helped propel it onto the New York Times bestseller list the month it was published, in July 2024. It stayed there through much of 2025, and its best sales weeks came six months after its debut, in the winter of 2024–2025.

If you are writing a leaner, faster mystery, thriller, or other action-focused story, then some of Moore’s choices—the length, the multiple in-depth character studies, the layered, complex sentences—might not work for your manuscript. However, tools such as dramatic irony (which we’ll cover in this post), delivering something readers don’t expect while making them wait for what they do expect (covered in my scene study), and using story questions to control tension and pacing (covered in my post on story questions) can be used to improve any manuscript.

I’ve written a few posts discussing covers, titles, and front matter—all the things a reader sees before they even get to the first words of the novel. I examined the cover of Ann Patchett’s The Dutch House, as well as the title, epigraph, and map in N.K. Jemisin’s The City We Became. Titles and covers get a lot of attention from authors, publishers, and readers, but there’s not a lot of discussion of the smaller, quieter elements of the front matter like epigraphs. Yet they are part of the reader’s experience too.

The God of the Woods gives us a chance to explore one of these elements because Moore chooses to include a table of contents. These are the first words we see after the copyright page, coming before the dedication, two epigraphs, and then what looks like a hand-drawn map of the Van Laar Preserve, where the story is set.

A table of contents is another kind of map—a story map. Moore didn’t have to include it; she could have simply let readers encounter the part titles as they occur in the text. V.E. Schwab, for example, does this in Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil, using part breaks to shift point-of-view characters as well as reveal a tiny but significant fact about each of them. (I discuss this in depth in my post on the opening of Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil.) So does Ian McEwan in What We Can Know, where a pivotal part break moves us to a new point of view and a new timeline. But neither of them includes a table of contents in their front matter.

Let’s take a look at Moore’s table of contents and see what it is telling us:

I: Barbara

II: Bear

III: When Lost

IV: Visitors

V: Found

VI: Survival

VII: Self-Reliance

These part titles immediately raise questions if we stop to think about them—and surely Moore means us to if she’s including them. We know from the book description that not one but two children are missing: Barbara, as well as her older brother. Are we going to be in Barbara’s point of view in the part bearing her name? Or perhaps in the part named “When Lost”? Is “Bear” a person or a . . . bear? Does “Found” mean what we think it means? If so, which of the two children is found? What guesses do we make about the end of the novel based on the titles of the last parts, “Survival” and “Self-Reliance”?

One possibility is that Moore is trying to reach a broader pool of readers by revealing these part titles ahead of time, especially the last three. As noted above, the novel’s publisher lists it as literary fiction, but also includes a thriller—Tana French’s The Searcher, one of the novels I analyzed in Novel Study—as a comparative title in their marketing materials. The cover walks the same line: A politely beautiful oil painting of a forest scene is marred by a disturbing, hyper-realistic thread of viscous pink fluid dripping down the surface. Readers who might not be prepared for a gritty thriller about missing children could be reassured by seeing the part title “Found.” We’ll find out in my post on the structure of the novel whether these readers are right to be reassured.

Should you include a table of contents in your own novel? It’s not typical to do so, but if you have named parts and want to show readers the overall structure of a complex novel or give a hint about the plot, it’s something to consider.

Let’s now move into the opening pages and see how Moore hooks readers. After the part title, “Barbara,” and a chapter title with a time stamp, “Louise, August 1975,” we get these first two sentences:

The empty bunk belongs to Barbara. These opening lines, along with the part and chapter titles, do more work than we are immediately aware of. The part title suggests that we will dive into the missing-girl plot promised in the book description, and the chapter title and second sentence establish that we are not, at least at first, going to get the story directly from Barbara herself. Note that Louise, our first point-of-view character, is someone with a stake in the disappearance. We can assume that, as counselor, Louise is going to be the first person blamed if Barbara is not found.

Finally, notice how efficiently Moore sneaks in a capsule character description of Louise rather than coming up with an elaborate pretext for giving us these details (like a character looking at themselves in a mirror). The details themselves are sharp and specific—even unexpected, other than her age. Moore mostly uses close third-person point of view (POV) in the novel, but here and elsewhere she shades toward the omniscient end of the spectrum. In this passage, the details enclosed in dashes, “twenty-three, short-limbed, rasp-voiced, jolly,” feel like an outside narrator describing Louise; they don’t feel like terms she would necessarily use to describe herself. After that moment of distance, Moore quickly takes us deeper into Louise’s POV by focusing on what she can feel (the warm rough planks under her bare feet) and what she thinks (processing that empty bunk).

By the end of the first page, Moore has fulfilled the promise of the book description and plunged us right into the story. By the end of this first chapter, we know more about Louise, and her counselor-in-training Annabel, than we do about the missing girl. And what we learn immediately raises the stakes further: Louise and Annabel were both out partying in the woods that night. Louise decides to lie about that fact and instructs Annabel to destroy the evidence; however, she is sure Annabel will fold under questioning. By letting us in on Louise’s decision to lie, Moore creates dramatic irony—the gap that opens when readers know something a character doesn’t—and raises the tension. Readers get to carry that secret forward into the plot and see what the ramifications are. This is a tool Moore uses throughout the novel to great effect, and we’ll discuss it further in the next two posts.

Let’s pause for a moment on Louise’s conviction that Annabel will “fold immediately” because the passage after it reveals quite a bit about both young women—and about one of the themes Moore will pursue throughout the novel:

This passage introduces a tension about class status that will emerge as one of the central themes of the novel. The fallout from Barbara’s disappearance will have no consequences for Annabel because her parents’ wealth and connections will protect her from them, while Louise will face potentially lifelong consequences. The detail about Louise supporting her mother—rather than getting support from her, as Annabel does from her parents—introduces a second theme focused on parenting and intergenerational dysfunction.

The paragraph is also a master class in the use of tone and syntax. We can track Louise’s shifting emotions as the passage unfolds. Her scorn for both Annabel and her parents comes through in the aside about Annabel’s name (which references Edgar Allan Poe’s spookily beautiful poem “Annabel Lee”) and shades into anger as she considers the future ahead of this privileged girl. The “never, ever” introduces a note of pity, which deepens into anxiety as Louise contemplates all the ways the deck might be further stacked against her if her worst fears about Barbara’s disappearance come true.

Notice also that this passage is one long sentence. Moore is able to keep piling on the details by adding parallel clauses. We start with the stable kernel of “She’ll cry,” then Moore keeps adding “and” clauses focused on Annabel. The verbs pile up, naming everything Annabel will get to do and Louise will not: “comforted,” “resume,” “pipelined,” “marry.” When the sentence shifts focus to Louise, Moore switches to “or” clauses—“or the fate,” “or the trouble”—before using gerunds to further break down those troubles: “getting a job,” “getting housing,” “supporting her mother.” The repetition of the grammatical structure prevents us from getting lost amidst this pile of words.

Chapter two shifts us to a new POV character and a new time: “Tracy, two months earlier, June 1975.” Tracy, we learn, is new to Camp Emerson. She opens the chapter by telling us about the camp rules, the most important of which is “WHEN LOST SIT DOWN AND YELL.” Notice the echo with the title of part three, “When Lost”? We’re only eight pages away from that table of contents, so readers might make the connection. If we pause to think about it, the link increases the tension as we wonder how it will come into play. Will Barbara remember the rule and use it? Or will Tracy also be lost and need to recall the rule? Through emphasis and repetition, Moore establishes the phrase as a motif she can return to throughout the novel.

Moore also uses this chapter to establish Tracy as one of the most important of the many POV characters we meet in the book. We’ve already seen in the first chapter that class status is going to be a prominent theme. Tracy’s class status is in flux, thanks to the recent divorce of her parents, so we get the sense that she may be less blinkered than some of the other narrators we meet, more able to see clues and subtext delivered from characters on either side of that class chasm.

In addition, Moore cleverly plants a passage in this chapter that makes us regard Tracy as our ally:

Tracy is our people—a reader just like us. We immediately empathize with her, and we’ll see in my post on the structure just how Moore plays on that empathy later in the novel. This technique of establishing a reader surrogate is a valuable tool if you are writing a multi-POV novel. Not all narrators are created equal, and the contrast between an alert, trustworthy POV character who can serve as a guide and an unreliable narrator can be exciting for readers.

Let’s jump forward now to the end of chapter two, where Moore briefly shades into omniscient narration as she returns to the camp rule “When lost sit down and yell.” The narrator pulls us into the future, telling us that the phrase “would echo in Tracy’s head for days, for weeks. For the rest of her life.” Is Tracy, who was twelve in 1975, still remembering this phrase fifty years later, in our time? This flash-forward (also called prolepsis) is another tool to remember. It makes the moment more resonant, connecting Tracy’s experience to both the theme and our own present day as readers. But there’s also a cost because readers now sense that, if Tracy does face life-or-death stakes in this novel, she will survive.

In the final sentences of the passage, Moore expands the meaning of “lost,” making it metaphorical and symbolic:

That expansion of meaning makes us wonder how literal any of these part titles might be. If “lost” is metaphorical, is “found” also metaphorical? What about “survival” and “self-reliance”? In the opening pages of the very next chapter, we learn that “Self-Reliance” is, in fact, also literal—the name for the manor house that is part of the summer camp property and the family home of none other than the missing girl, Barbara. It’s the same house from which her older brother, Bear, disappeared years earlier.

The opening chapters of The God of the Woods teach us that our POV characters may be blinkered, may withhold information, may even lie outright. We are right to wonder whether Moore might be playing the same game with us, the readers, on the story level. Dangling these part titles in front of us before we’ve started reading might be her way of dragging us fully into the experience of the story—of being lost, surviving, and finally learning self-reliance.

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