Benjamin Percy (The Dark Net) serves up an addictive mix of gritty crime fiction and otherworldly horror in his story collection Suicide Woods.
The book contains nine stories and a novella, each chilling in its own way. Percy's prose is exacting, finely tuning the atmospherics that give the collection such an eerie overall feeling. These are stories full of dread, with an uncanny resemblance to our own world. The collection opens with "The Cold Boy," in which a farmer pulls his drowned nephew out of a frozen pond only to discover the boy is reanimated with some weird, icy life-force. Percy captures the desolation of Midwestern winters, the foreboding features of the environment: "The crows are overhead, hundreds of them, a circling black eddy that blots out the sun."
Percy adeptly switches between the tropes of horror and the trickier narrative structures of neo-noir. Several of the stories are grimly fascinating crime reads. "Suspect Zero" begins with a body on a train and ends with an unexpected suspect striking again. "Dial Tone" features a disaffected and insane telemarketer slowly recalling a gruesome murder. In this unforgettable tale, Percy uses phone lines and cell towers to explore modernity's weird state of estrangement: "There's plenty of room for a signal to ricochet or duplicate or get lost. There are so many words--the ghosts of old conversations--floating around us." In his crime stories, especially in "Writs of Possession," Percy reveals a critical eye. Crime and disenfranchisement go hand in hand, and he never fails to show what stands between the haves and the have-nots. But it's not all class-based. "The Dummy," for example, examines conflicts of gender before culminating in a violent showdown.
In the titular, penultimate story, "Suicide Woods," Percy returns to his sense of horror, depicting a group of suicide survivors who go to extreme lengths to face death. But it is the following novella, "The Uncharted," that is the scariest entry in the collection. It follows a team of adventurers into remote Alaska, where they become stranded on a mysterious island. As the dangers of the island and its fearsome inhabitants become clearer, the characters begin hallucinating and seeing themselves in different parts of their lives. Here Percy holds back nothing in terms of imagery. The story achieves the texture of a nightmare as each character is stalked by phantoms both real and make-believe.
Suicide Woods is a testament to Percy's skill as a writer. He takes no shortcuts in eliciting thrills. The collection is by turns provocative and terrifying. --Scott Neuffer, writer, poet, editor of trampset
Shelf Talker: Benjamin Percy is in top form with this collection of crime stories and classic horror.