Suicide Woods Stories

Benjamin Percy — 2019

A spine-tingling new collection of stories from the acclaimed author of Thrill Me and The Dark Net Benjamin Percy is a versatile and propulsive storyteller whose genre-busting novels and story collections have ranged from literary to thriller to postapocalyptic. In his essay collection, Thrill Me, he laid bare for readers how and why he channels disparate influences in his work. Now, in his first story collection since the acclaimed Refresh, Refresh, Percy brings his page-turning skills to bear in Suicide Woods, a potent brew of horror, crime, and weird happenings in the woods. A boy in his uncle’s care falls through the ice on a pond and emerges in a frozen, uncanny state. A group of people in therapy for suicidal ideation undergoes a drastic session in the woods with fatal consequences. A body found on a train and a blood-soaked carpet in an empty house are clues to a puzzling crime in a small town. And in a pulse-quickening novella, thrill seekers on a mapping expedition into the “Bermuda Triangle” of remote Alaska are stranded on a sinister island that seems to want them dead. In story after story, which have appeared in magazines ranging from the Virginia Quarterly Review and Orion Magazine to McSweeney’s and Ploughshares, Percy delivers haunting and chilling narratives that will have readers hanging on every word. A master class in suspense and horror, Suicide Woods is a dark, inventive collection packed to the gills with eerie, can’t-miss tales.

Reviews

Darren S. Layne@funkyplaid

Sep 20, 2021

DNF p. 55. After reading the first four short stories in Benjamin Percy's collection, I decided that was quite enough. Percy is a gifted writer at times, with a keen view into human nature and a near-command of contextual details that paint believable pictures in a myriad of disparate settings. It's just that this is not a good story genre for him, because he really does it a disservice here. What could have been a treasury of intelligent and genuinely spooky vignettes set in the rural, frigid Midwest repeatedly ends up as a series of immature gore-fantasies that physically repulse rather than raise the hairs. The first four selections all start out with intricate and engrossing introductions that convey immaculate background color, and then quickly devolve to gotcha-type cautionary tales that often rely on corporeal ultraviolence to shock the audience. It almost feels as if these scenarios were written by two people: one to provide the setting and characters and one to corrupt them with rote physical and emotional brutality. On more than one occasion the stories left me feeling disgusted rather than entranced, with descriptive violence toward animals and human children that just doesn't do anything to enhance the narrative. Two of the four tales that I read end abruptly in awkward places, showing me that Percy doesn't quite have a line on the pacing of supernatural/horrific micro-stories. They may get better later in the collection, but I can't convince myself to forge ahead with such disappointment in my gut. Had Percy eschewed some of the obvious "thriller" tropes and spent more time confronting the human condition and the inner monologues of his main characters, these stories might have been ten times more horrific and, therefore, effective in short-story form.