Suicide Woods: Stories

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 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 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 novella, "The Uncharted," that is the scariest entry. In it, a team of adventurers in remote Alaska 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.

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

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