In Percy's first story collection since Refresh, Refresh, 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.
The characters in Benjamin Percy’s new collection, Suicide Woods are built around landscape the way roses build themselves around a trellis. They are twisted and thorny and beautiful ... A small masterpiece ... emotionally riveting ... will leave you with a deep sensation of panic and dread.
Each mesmerizing story in Benjamin Percy’s latest collection is rooted in the uncanny, where the familiar is freaky and the impossible 'a white smear rising out of the darkness.' But even in Percy’s eeriest tales, compassion and wry humor infuse the narratives. Suicide Woods is more Stranger Things than Twilight Zone, closer to King than Kafka, and it’s as entertaining as whatever chilling show you’re bingeing on Netflix right now ... In each one of Percy’s stories, the settings are alive ... You’ve been warned.
... a total nightmare—in the best way possible ... This merging of reality and dream states has a powerfully unsettling effect, implying that much of what we accept as normal is, in fact, more than slightly Kafkaesque and underscoring a central theme of the collection: that the real nightmare is the one we create for ourselves by attempting to constrain or conquer nature—both human and environmental ... All of this might sound irredeemably bleak and misanthropic, but Percy nestles shimmers of hope in the dark forest, as it were ... Above all, the language throughout is remarkable: sharp and stinging, yet replete with desolate, hypnagogic beauty. Settings are imbued with distinct personalities ... This precision of language and metaphor is most affecting when it immerses us in the characters’ peculiar worlds ... Poignant, caustic, empathetic, and extremely relevant to our contemporary social climate, the narratives in Suicide Woods linger like a not-unpleasant, post-migraine aura, framing perceptions of what we accept as normal in our surroundings—and in ourselves—long after their sometimes-inconclusive conclusions.
