Book Review: 'The Woods,' Janice Obuchowski 

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• Courtesy Of Andy Duback/Duback Photography
• Janice Obuchowski

Janice Obuchowski's award-winning debut collection of short stories, The Woods, opens with "The Cat," an eerie tale of a neurotic writing professor arriving in a small Vermont town to teach at the local college. Her own writing isn't going well, but the bucolic environment and the local ghost stories entrance her, and she befriends a feral cat. Then she discovers a bloody bone while jogging down a logging road.

Obuchowski's unnamed narrator begins to find death (and perhaps murder) lurking everywhere. Her eye records these moments with cracklingly good descriptions. Of a dead bird that she finds with its neck dangling by a thread, she tells us: "It was taupe and brown and white — a striation almost like marble — with a tiny patch of white beneath its small beak. The eyes — round like dark seeds — were open and dull, black smoke within glass."

Just when Obuchowski's taut prose has prepared the reader for some serious carnage à la Stephen King's The Shining, the story concludes with the narrator's realization that she's been romanticizing the "untamed" rural life and seeing only what she wanted to see. "All these details I accumulated, considered, and meanwhile, I didn't know anything at all about what was really happening around me," she admits.

This epiphany — that mundane reality can be harder to accept than occult explanations — is poignant on its own. But it also makes for a refreshing moment of self-awareness that sets Obuchowski's writing apart from both horror-genre tropes and the transplant gaze typical of so much writing set in Vermont.

Fans of literary horror shouldn't worry, though; this anticlimax at the beginning of the collection turns out to be a deft feint, foreshadowing some far spookier stories to come.

Winner of the John Simmons Short Fiction Award for The Woods, Obuchowski grew up in Shelburne and has published her stories widely, taught at Middlebury College and served as an editor at New England Review. Middlebury, where the author now lives, isn't explicitly named as the college town where the stories in The Woods take place, but the context clues add a fun roman à clef element for those acquainted with the area.

While the narrator of the opening story bears some resemblance to the author, The Woods is not a collection of thinly veiled autobiographical fiction. The second story, "The Orams," makes a bold leap in perspective; here, the narrator is an old-timer who uses the royal "we" and takes on the collective voice of the town itself. In recounting the increasingly violent rivalry of the fictional Oram brothers, the narrator juxtaposes their behavior with that of Robert Frost, referred to only as "Our Poet."

Like the opening story, this one pushes back against Vermont's pastoral mythos and the hagiography of Frost. Obuchowski adds balance with anecdotes of the revered poet's petty, cruel and downright weird behavior — eating cigarettes, for instance, or the time "When he got jealous of another famous writer, he set fire in a trashcan and yelled 'fire' so no one would hear the other famous writer read his work."

Throughout, Obuchowski populates her stories with academics and their families. Most of them have either recently arrived to teach at the local college, like the narrator of the opening story, or have taught there for many years. They've brought with them writer's block, unhappy marriages and a fascination with the "wildness" of the woods surrounding them, which oscillates between wonder and fear.

In "Mountain Shade," the bereaved spouse of a philosopher gets dangerously turned around while jogging. In another story, a family struggling through the dark days of the pandemic encounters a bear. These stories create tension not with plot fireworks but through vividly realistic dynamics among characters.

Obuchowski depicts family strife exceedingly well, showing the spiritual toll that caregiving labor can take on spouses and parents. Two stories are linked by infidelity. In "Potions," a wife learns of her husband's affair, and in "Sylvia Who Dreams of Dactyls," one of the standouts of the book, a woman haunted by her own liaison hears the syllabic rhythm of her lover's name echoing everywhere she goes.

The author's talent for switching perspectives lends the collection a degree of complexity and empathy beyond what a novel with a single protagonist can achieve. We see both the frustration of young writers struggling to find a place in their hypercompetitive field and the dread and regret of elderly academics who have long enjoyed the stability of tenure. Obuchowski also writes not just convincingly but fluently from a father's perspective ("The Bear Is Back") and a teenager's ("Monsters").

"Self-Preservation" is perhaps the most alluring story in the collection. A good old-fashioned ghost story, it repeats a pattern seen elsewhere in The Woods: A married couple from southern California, newly arrived to teach at the local college, settle into their beautiful yet somehow disquieting surroundings.

As in all of Obuchowski's stories, tensions simmer just below the surface. Lisette and her husband, childless after losing their first pregnancy, have a professional power dynamic to navigate: The college hired him but not her. Listless and stung, Lisette fills her time by going on walks with a friendly woman who says she's their new neighbor up the road.

As the story snakes toward its thrilling conclusion, Obuchowski misses no opportunity to poke fun at the pretensions of academic flatlanders. "At first, I wanted to run screaming — all this quiet — but we've grown accustomed to the pace," the VP of student affairs tells the couple over glasses of chenin blanc.

"Vermont started out as a lark, a way to improve their moods," Obuchowski writes, a moment that oozes with so much privilege it's downright ominous. The foreboding increases when Lisette has a close call while driving the steep roads in the snow.

The author toys with horror tropes while portraying its protagonist's mixture of grief, resentment, loneliness and anxiety with great humanity. In one scene, for instance, Lisette walks to the country store without gloves, and the old woman who owns the store rubs her nearly frostbitten hands to warm them. This small act of kindness and intimacy from a stranger provokes flashbacks to "a colleague squeezing her hand as she waited for the ambulance. Pain had dizzied her, her abdomen on fire."

Lisette is a richly rendered character; any reader can relate to some aspect of her, even without having been in her circumstances. And, as in all great ghost stories, there's more at stake emotionally for her than simple danger. Ultimately, Lisette finds herself faced with a choice between her husband's life of dull cocktail parties and book clubs, and finding her own way — which happens to lead down a terrifying path into the woods.

Does she make it out? The woods in Obuchowski's stellar debut don't offer answers as much as they demand that readers ask themselves questions — about whether we're capable of confronting what we fear the most and whether we're willing to lose ourselves in order to find our way.

From "Sylvia Who Dreams of Dactyls"

Sylvia wakes thinking of dactyls as if they'd been spilling out across her dreams. Washington, Dumbledore. She stretches, throws back her comforter, opens the curtains, and lets ashen light bathe her. Some subterranean part of her head engaging in pattern assessment. Bothersome: yes. Trigonometry: no.

In the kitchen she drinks coffee from a mug glazed cobalt — dusted sunshine about her shoulders — and looks out to her back fields. In the distance a slim streak of lake is silver blue, and the mountains are August lush and serene. Gesturing, cluster fuck. This abstract clutter, this part of herself not making sense to herself — pursuing its own avenues of nonsense inquiry. A nighttime devoted to syllabic count.

©2022 Janice Obuchowski. Used with permission University of Iowa Press.