This fiery collection of fiction does justice to growing up during the hunt for Osama bin Laden. Woods’ latest startles and sings. The eight stories vary in tone and in clip but will not soon be forgotten ... Woods’ writing is deep and dynamic. Her characters are complex and never sink into the ease of generalizations. She spares no experience in her representation of modern America; it is a rare work of literary fiction that fully showcases the rich and diverse American populace. The stories establish instant, distinct voices, much like Roxane Gay’s recent Difficult Women, and fans of Miranda July’s fiction will relish the wily creativity of Woods’ plots. This book is tight, intelligent, and important, and sure to secure Woods a seat in the pantheon of critical twenty-first-century voices.
...[a] stunning collection ... Many of the book’s characters are queer, but the stories are never ‘only’ about their queerness. It’s an integral part of their identities, and a complicated one, often making them outsiders in the place they’re from, but also propelling them to get out. Sometimes, that escape becomes a strange sort of privilege when they return. Yet for all these stories’ similarities, one never has the feeling that plagues some story collections, of reading the same basic idea over and over. Woods is a gifted storyteller, and each piece follows its own unique twists and unpredictable turns. She has an eye for haunting details that give each narrative the texture of a fully-realized world ... Told with and wit and gravitas, Chavisa Woods’s Things to Do When You’re Goth in the Country provides humane snapshots of outsider communities often overlooked in contemporary fiction.
In the tradition of Shirley Jackson, William Faulkner, and Flannery O’Connor, Woods’s third full-length work, Things to Do When You’re Goth in the Country, explores the haunted terrain of the American psyche through grotesque depictions of characters and setting. These stories invoke an atmospheric malevolence that pushes characters to the brink of madness, violence, and transgression. But unlike Jackson’s haunted house or O’Connor’s secular characters, Woods’s subjects are not basically corrupt. Woods embraces the complex humanity of her characters even as she explores the tragedy of enculturation, identifying forces that divide us. Think of her as a literary exorcist, calling out certain entities that possess rural America: isolation, working-class poverty, drugs, incarceration, military dogma, and evangelical religion.
Most stories take place in or around Illinois in towns where the army base and the prison are both near by and this nation’s endless wars are far away and on TV and mostly fought by you or your neighbors … Queerness untrashes people…[the] narrator says in the title story, and we feel the grittiness of this position?—?it’s not lonely?—?Woods never delves into nostalgia?—?but it makes for existence having a different purpose … As serious as this all is, somehow Chavisa Woods offers it to us free of didacticism and full of humor and flat out absurdity, as if to say, it’s absurd what we refuse to see and acknowledge. She creates a kind of meta reality?—?this world but peeling back the other possibility of our reality underneath.
As weird and wrenching and ‘out there’ as they may seem, [Woods’] stories also scream real-life Midwest … Woods brings an often invisible landscape into rare focus. It's a book that feels especially resonant given the current cultural moment in America. While it's a work of fiction, and one that even ventures into fantasy, the people at its center are the working class and the rural poor. Often dismissed or even despised, they're shown here in their full complexity over the course of 221 vivid pages.
Throughout these stories, Woods’ characters positions themselves as of the country, but also alien to it. It is where they are from as well as from where they have fled … The final, and title, story is the only one which is perhaps too on the nose, at least thematically, but it’s here that Wood’s lyricism shines above her content. A literal description of what a queer goth teenager does to occupy themselves in the country, (smoke, cut, make ‘fucked-up Barbie doll-head necklaces . . . Vietnam ear tokens honoring the violence of girlishness’ to freak out their neighbors) becomes a toe-tapping, tongue-wagging séance of its own. Echoing the very rhythm of a sermon while offering a how-to for political, cultural, and religious subversion, her prose bends, bleeds, and bulldozes.
In visceral descriptions of decay, boredom, and limited opportunities, Woods besieges her coming-of-age characters with drugs, guns, jail, pedophilia, and teen pregnancy ... The most heart-wrenching story, 'What’s Happening in the News?,' is a punch-to-the-gut exposé of the hypocrisy of religious zealots who organize consumer boycotts and repress sexuality, and of military recruiters who exploit poor teens with no other options. As Woods’s characters struggle to eke out an identity, they confront the bleak difficulties of their lives and persist in surviving.
