Review: They Fear Not Men in the Woods

[auberi]

Title: They Fear Not Men in the Woods
Author: Gretchen McNeil
Genre: Horror

“I’ve never once been afraid in the woods and I’m certainly not going to start now.”

Jen Monroe receives a long-awaited call from her estranged mother that the body of her father, a forest ranger who went missing when Jen was sixteen, has finally been found. But when she returns to the small town where she grew up, Jen finds that no one is able or willing to answer questions about her father’s death — or the circumstances in which his body was found. Even stranger: a group of hikers has been missing for several months after setting out for the same area that Jen’s father told her he would be patrolling the last time she saw him. Convinced her father is still alive and determined to find him, Jen decides to recreate his last hike. When her former friend group (including her childhood best friend, high school best frenemy, and high school ex-boyfriend, among others) find out her intention to go into the woods, they demand to join her. What they find in the forest forever changes them.

The film comp for this book is Midsommar, and I know exactly why they marketed it that way, but better film comps might be The Blair Witch Project or The Ritual meets Annihilation. Despite elements of folklore, I’d place this book very firmly within the eco-horror subgenre rather than folk horror.

While the sense of dread is slow and mounting, the plot moved along pretty quickly. The first few chapters are a little slow but once the plan is in motion it turns into a real page-turner. Each chapter does a good job ratcheting the tension higher. The reveal(s) were sufficiently built up to.

I’ve seen mixed opinions on Jen as a protagonist. She begins the book as a knowing and willing affair partner. She’s dry and sarcastic, and even downright mean, to just about everyone in the book. She’s an unreliable narrator about her internal states. And having said all this, I’m very much in the “unlikeable to YOU” camp; I thought she was grand. She’s funny and resourceful and incredibly dedicated to her father and to the woods they both love. For a story where some fairly frightening, sad, and gruesome things happen on a spooky camping trip, this book is actually a lot of fun and I think that is due in large part to Jen’s perspective.

Apart from being eco-horror, this book seems to be very much in the tradition of gothic literature. The Washington redwood forest setting is unsettling and pervasive, and it receives the same narrative treatment as ruined medieval castles or fog-covered moors did in early gothic lit. There’s a strong element of the sublime as a mixture of awe and terror in the descriptions of the woods and the events therein. There are plot-relevant found journals. McNeil emphasizes themes of corruption, concealment, and ‘haunting’ — not only the past haunting the present, but the “civilized” world haunting the “natural” world (and vice versa).

From looking at ratings on storygraph and goodreads, this book seems to be polarizing. I’ll admit that, despite personally loving it, this book is not for everyone. I think it will best suit readers looking for a creepy, folklore-tinged tale in a visceral natural setting who like their main characters flawed.

Warnings

Graphic death, gun violence, body horror

Review: Beyond Welcome

[perfectnumber628]

 I reviewed the book "Beyond Welcome"

"Beyond Welcome" asks, why would Joseph do this? Could it be because, even though he had lived in Egypt for a long time, and had basically assimilated, he still felt that he needed to prove his loyalty to Pharaoh, or else people would think he wasn't Egyptian "enough"? As immigrants, there is pressure to fit in, to go along with unjust systems that exist in the country you have immigrated to. You don't want to stand out. You don't want people to see that you're different. So you don't take a stand and challenge things that are clearly wrong.

 

Read it here: Beyond Welcome (a book about listening to and learning from immigrants)

Review: Henry Goes Bush

[mostlycrunchy]

Title: Henry Goes Bush
Author: Wayne Marshall
Genre: Speculative historical fiction. I think.

Henry Lawson and Andrew 'Banjo' Patterson were Australian poets who played a huge role in making the national myth of the bush, which forms part of the (white) Australian identity. As a kid I was taught their poems - mostly Banjo's - but we weren't really taught anything about the writers, even though Lawson is on our ten dollar note. They existed somewhere in 'the past' where all writers resided during my childhood.

When Lawson was a young man, he made a trip to the outback town of Bourke, and it's not clear exactly what he did there; there are many different versions hung on few historical facts. In Henry Goes Bush he's essentially forced out there by his publisher at The Bulletin to experience the real bush (he lives in Sydney,) and dry out, as history records his attachment to drink blighted his entire life.

In this version, a series of earthquakes in Bourke open strangely lit tunnels that link the town to other realities in which various different versions of Lawson's visit take place, including one in which his poet's feud with his rival Banjo is to be settled, not in the pages of The Bulletin, but in a gunfight to the death. (And another in which his intense friendship with Jim Gordon is not platonic.)

The story intially switches between Henry's story and an overview of the historical record, but once the latter is concluded the narrative picks up, as Henry uses the tunnels to escape from one misadventure to the next, eventually ending up in the murderous Banjo's sights.

I had a great time. I had absolutely no clue where this novel was going at first, but the ending was satisfying. I feel like I learned something, too. I'm unlikely to read any of the biographies the author credits; the reality is rather depressing after all, and I don't like biographies in general, but I feel like a hole in my general knowledge has been loosely patched, at least.