150 pages
Published 2024
Read from July 28 to August 4
Rating: 3.5 out of 5
Lately, my partner R has gotten fixated on queer Appalachian fantasy and horror. I've been wanting to write in this niche myself, so from professional as well as personal interest, I should start familiarizing myself with it.
R recommended this slim novel as a good place to begin. Of course, no matter how slender the book is, it’s still summer as I try to read it, so I’m having my usual difficulties in finding opportunities to read (or the attention span to read when I do).
For its length, Woods is a slow burn, which didn’t help my focus. It centers on an "invert" named Leslie, a nurse with PTSD from World War I, who gets sent to an isolated community in the hills of eastern Kentucky in 1929. There he finds community hostility; an authoritarian brimstone preacher; a fellow trans man (as we might now consider him) who is being abused by the community; and something strange deep in the hills.
I felt that Mandelo does an excellent job at situating Woods in its time and place, conveying Leslie’s queerness and neurodivergence without resorting to couching them in modern terms. The peril of queerness in dangerous times makes for uneasy reading, and the loneliness of trying to model a form of queerness that doesn’t fit, at a time when few models were circulated even within the community, is heartbreaking. Humans (or at least Christofascists) are the true horror in Woods.
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