Wood Sorrel House by Zach Williams, 2022
The magic trick:
A relentless slog of a story
If you were paying close attention, you will remember that we did a whole week of stories by Zach Williams back in February. Almost without exception, I really enjoyed and learned a lot from them. So I’m disappointed to report that the “Wood Sorrel House, which in fact is another story from the same Beautiful Days collection that featured in that SSMT week, is actually my least favorite thing by him that I’ve read – by some distance.
We have a family stuck in a cabin apocalypse tale. Published in the throes of COVID, this isn’t a particularly interesting concept. It’s certainly one we’ve seen before, namely two movies from this decade: M. Night Shyamalan’s Knock At The Cabin and Sam Esmail’s Leave The World Behind, based on the Rumaan Alam novel.
So, there’s that part of it that just feels a little bit like, OK, we’ve gone down this (deserted) road before. Not even necessarily Zach Williams’ fault. For all I know, he wrote this story five years before those other titles came out. I’m not crying plagiarism here. I’m just saying I didn’t find it very exciting or interesting.
Also, this story drags. You keep waiting for some kind of twist, some kind of additional wrinkle; and it just never shows. So in that way, I guess it is an interesting way to write a story – where you just grind the reader down. That’s maybe not a very nice way of saying it, but truly, there’s like a relentless march to this story. And perhaps if this is a story that’s about the relentlessness of time, it’s a bold move to make your reader feel that relentlessness by moving along over quite a bit of time and without any big plot motion.
It takes a confident writer to prompt the reader to ask: “My god, how long have I been reading this story? Will it ever end?” on purpose.
And that’s quite a trick on Williams’s part.
The selection:
Nights, once Max was down, Ronna and Jacob would play Risk—an old set, the box’s split corners held with masking tape—and talk their way along the edges of the hard questions. For example, their car: where was it? There wasn’t even a driveway. Had someone dropped them off? From whom had they rented the cottage? For how long? How much time had passed before these questions occurred to them? How much more before the questions grew urgent?
Jacob argued that the way to understand the situation was through numbers, facts, records—anything they could observe and set down, because that was the way you solved a puzzle. But Ronna felt sure that the place didn’t follow those rules.
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