March 22nd, 2022 - Wood Sorrel House

Dear TNY,

It’s a new Monday and I’m back in Colorado and I just finished up with “Wood Sorrel House”.

And I don’t know, man.  There was only one thing that ruffled my feathers.  The snapping turtle was described as having teeth.  Well, turtles don’t have teeth.  They have a beak.  And I’ll concede it’s a possibility that maybe the author has never seen a turtle before (because I don’t know where this person is from and where they live), but I have personally witnessed bales of red-eared sliders in Central Park.  So what I’m saying is that any one of your editors, who fucking live in NYC with said red-eared sliders, should have known that turtles don’t have teeth.  One reads all this bullshit about TNY editors being sticklers for details, but I find this complete disregard for the real world all the time in your shit.  Be better?

That aside, I liked watching this story, if that makes sense.  Like, I didn’t transcend the plane or anything.  But, due to the mystery of this plot, there was a sense of necessity to the pursuit of this narrative.  The imagery was beautiful.  And there was a modicum of insanity to the piece that felt natural, as if this is what would happen if people were stuck in a place like this.  The decision to make the baby, essentially, a god, was genius.  That could only drive up the crazy in this story, not down.  But this wasn’t crazy crazy, you know?  It had its rules and it lived by those rules while rolling out a very honed world.

I do question the originality, right?  As I would.  You know me.  You’ve published at least one loop story before and I knocked it for being a literary Groundhog Day.  But I can’t imagine that movie is the first loop story.  Just the first one I remember ingesting.  And this had a different feel to it.  It was more like Vivarium.  In fact, that’s all I kept thinking about.  This was the Vivarium of the woods.  Except in this, the baby never aged.  And was, at least to our understanding, this couple’s original baby, from before they got stuck here (again, a clever decision on the author’s part to differentiate it from the movie).  So, all that being said, is this doing something new?  It mostly follows the same plot of Groundhog Day, so that’s not new (the plot being that you can fight this artifice, but the only way to “win” is to give in and just live it, just like Ronna did in this story).  So, that’s not new.  And because the baby was hers and did not age (and was not some fucking alien thing), there was no sinister forward motion from the baby, like in Vivarium. It just didn’t feel like this was new, but it wasn’t so much of a retread that I cast it off as pointless. But I don’t know what the point was?

Also, I think Groundhog Day is my favorite loop story (Bill fucking Murray, you know? You guys know). But Palm Springs is pretty good too. And there is an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation that’s a pretty good loop story too.

I don’t know.  I didn’t hate it.  I was curious to see what would happen.  I appreciated that there was no explanation of the mechanism.  We are just thrown in it, like the characters, and the author respected us enough to not spoonfeed us.  I’ll go back to my statement about adhering to the story’s rules as the piece of craft which allowed that to happen.  If the rules never break, then we can take it.  But, I will offer counter-evidence in the form of Jacob disappearing that the rules were broken.  Because, of course, she couldn’t leave but he did. But I didn’t hang up to much on Jacob leaving, weirdly.

So what to say.  I don’t know.  I keep saying that.  I don’t know.  I’m not mad.  But I’m not moved either.  Somehow, by writing a thing that slips between the plots of those two movies I compared above, it does what neither of them did:  whelm.  And yet, I’m not so mad that I’m yelling at you.  What a world.

I guess I’ll be seeing you next week.  Ever-faithful.

Nick

P.S. I didn’t even rage about my life in this one!