It was always summer on the mountain.

March 19, 2022 10:44 AM

Wood Sorrel House is a short (horror?) story by Zach Williams. Content warning for themes of child neglect and abuse. The author discusses his story here. Archive link.
posted by Rora (12 comments total)

LOL. The author got himself into a real pickle with how to end the story, and his solution seems to have been to just give up. No resolution, no answers to the questions posed, just Eh, The End. As a reader, I felt gipped.
posted by Flock of Cynthiabirds at 12:25 PM on March 19, 2022

Please don't use the word gipped or gyped to mean ripped off or having something stolen from you. It is a pejorative of Gyps*y and is, essentially racist against Romani people.
posted by Thella at 1:29 PM on March 19, 2022 [10 favorites]

I am worried that the author doesn’t know what turtles are, with their teeth and padded chests.

Gave me flashbacks to Cecil talking about Khoshekh.
posted by The Monster at the End of this Thread at 4:53 PM on March 19, 2022 [1 favorite]

I don’t feel the end was an author cop-out at all — it was an acceptance of permanent responsibility.

This was beautiful, fairytale dream logic, and a wonderful crystallization of new-parent anxiety. Thank you for sharing it.
posted by ook at 7:42 PM on March 19, 2022 [2 favorites]

“Responsibility” isn’t the right word. There’s a lot more complexity in this one, I think it’s going to be puzzling at me for a while.

This story is worth a better conversation than the one we’ve got so far is I guess my point
posted by ook at 7:54 PM on March 19, 2022 [1 favorite]

This story hit me in a number of ways.

There's the setting, which felt achingly familiar, since we've lived in Vermont, and I spent a lot of time in upstate NY, all in very rural areas.

There's being a new parent.

There's homesteading, trying to figure out the things and systems around you.

The horrible things happening to the kid, though, got me worst of all.
posted by doctornemo at 8:17 PM on March 19, 2022

Nothing horrible happened to the kid, technically...he could not be hurt. He didn't seem to really need to eat or drink. I kept having the thought that he was controlling things, like the kid in the Twilight Zone episode but less consciously. Why could his parents age but not him? He didn't seem to learn or be aware of time, either. Whether that would change when his mother died is unknown.
posted by emjaybee at 9:32 PM on March 19, 2022 [1 favorite]

She grieved for Quinn most. He was more real in a way, more needing of her care, than either Max or Jacob.
posted by Thella at 12:13 AM on March 20, 2022 [3 favorites]

What I found compelling about this story was the way it captured two seemingly contradictory emotions about parenting. First, the feeling that "it" will never end, whether it's the foreverness of the parent-child bond, or some particularly difficult phase. (I wonder how this story will hit parents of children with severe disabilities.) The other feeling is the fear and pain of knowing that at some point you will not be there for your child.

I'm haunted by what Ronna put Max through (whether he could suffer physically or not), but I could understand both her desire to escape and desperate attempts to prepare Max for her eventual death.
posted by Rora at 11:22 AM on March 20, 2022

Nothing horrible happened to the kid, technically

Yeah, I kept telling myself that. Which didn't stop me from flinching with each horror.
posted by doctornemo at 11:31 AM on March 21, 2022

I breezed past the author's name and was kind of assuming, I guess because Ronna was the viewpoint character, that a woman had written it.

I was struck immediately by the way the father could and did walk away. He craved answers and adventure and hope and freedom from the monotony and, wanting them, he just went.

And then when I read the interview, I was super grossed out by the author's assessment that Ronna was smarter and wiser and gentler and more flexible... the way patriarchy always puts womanhood and motherhood on a pedestal.

I wish a woman had written it and would want to hear what she said about it, because I think there's a feminist reading of this that the author isn't empathetic enough to give.
posted by BrashTech at 1:38 PM on March 21, 2022 [1 favorite]

I wish a woman had written it

I am a cis-woman and not a mother so I didn't read it through a mother's lens. I think it is an interesting story for someone who identifies as a non birth-giver to write. It could be exploring post-partum psychosis from a disinterested perspective. Or the impact of giving birth to and trying to raise a god. Jacob might actually not have really left, it is just that Ronna does not know him anymore because he doesn't engage in her world. There are many options to read into the story through alternative non-maternal perspectives.

Does the author's gender matter? You and me, the responders, are the meaning-makers here. DIY feminist reading.
posted by Thella at 5:20 PM on March 26, 2022 [1 favorite]