While a lot of the stories in Benjamin Percy’s new story collection Suicide Woods present themselves structurally as horror stories, their makeup is something else entirely and that is not always a good thing, While his advice is invaluable (Thrill Me is an excellent writing tutorial) and he is able to craft scenes of intense and unnerving horror, too much of the time they feel overwritten, maybe the product of adhering too religiously to techniques learned in MFA programs. It makes for a rather beautiful arrangement even as blood flows and body parts start to fly, but I sensed a lot of the time in these and the majority of Percy’s other writing I hid the fact that the stories, in their essence were not very original. They were good, sure, but I have seen them executed better in stories by other writers and with a lot more originality too. This is not a bad collection by the way, some of the stories are better than others and I do not think of any of them as stinkers. The opening story, “The Cold Boy” where an uncle saves his nephew from drowning in a frozen on only for the boy to come back as something not of this world is a highlight. Percy is an expert at rich descriptions whether that is the human like gash on the wrestling mannequin in the strange “The Dummy” or the way glass sticks out of a man’s belly in the novella “The Uncharted”. But just like in his collection Refresh, Refresh, the title story is the book’s best offering, a story of a group of severely depressed people finding solace in the odd therapeutic practice of their doctor, who likes to take them out to the woods and confront their trauma head on. It’s not only the best story in this book, but among the best pieces Percy has given us.
Rating: 4/5
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