Title: The Tangled WoodsAuthor: Emily Raboteau
Series: Dark Corners Collection #5
First Published: September 27, 2018
Publisher: Amazon Original Stories
Pages: 40
Genre: Horror, Short Stories
Format: Ebook
Source: Prime Reading
Rating:
Synopsis:
He went on the road expecting the worst of America, but what if the worst of America was also in him? This is the unsettling story of a man in a midlife crisis and his unexpected awakening, by award-winning writer Emily Raboteau.
Poison-tongued film critic Reginald Wright is known for his creative insults and intolerance for the garbage culture, insufferable rudeness, and thoughtless racism of predictably common people. Now, against his better judgment, and with a marriage in crisis, he’s attempting a getaway in the Poconos that quickly fulfills his every low expectation. In fact, it’s becoming a nightmare. And that’s just what Reginald needs to wake up.
Buy the Book: AmazonReview
The Tangled Woods is a somber short story about a man deep in his midlife crisis. The main character Reginald is a film critic, professor, and genuine piece of shit husband and father. He laments about craving adventure and being dissatisfied with the predictability of his life. He had settled down and married a respectable woman involved with women’s ministry and running a popular mommy blog. The two share an adorable son who, to his disappointment, is interested in Harry Potter and superheroes. These things should be the ideal, the American dream, but it is not enough, so he seeks out adventure between the legs of college mistresses.
The resort he heads to for his family vacation is an absolute nightmare of tired, angry parents and loud, out-of-control kids that only exasperates his inner turmoil. Reginald is on the edge, and he’s looking for someone to push him past the breaking point. I could appreciate what the author was going for even if it is a bit heavy handed. The struggling veteran father was a good foil for Reginald’s self-pitying upper middle class melodrama. While the foundations for the character work in this story is good the plot felt a bit weak, despite an appropriately tender ending. The story was not long enough for the type of story that the author was trying to accomplish, so it ended up falling a little flat.
Quote
“He held him close, this brave little boy who still believed in magic.”
Content Warnings
View Spoiler »About the Author
About Emily Raboteau
Emily Raboteau is the author of a novel, The Professor’s Daughter (Henry Holt) and a work of creative nonfiction, Searching for Zion (Grove/Atlantic), named a best book of 2013 by The Huffington Post and The San Francisco Chronicle, a finalist for the Hurston Wright Legacy Award, grand prize winner of the New York Book Festival, and winner of a 2014 American Book Award. Her fiction and essays have been widely published and anthologized in Best American Short Stories, The New York Times, The New Yorker, Tin House, Buzzfeed, Literary Hub, The Guardian, Guernica, VQR, The Believer, Salon, and elsewhere. Honors include a Pushcart Prize, The Chicago Tribune’s Nelson Algren Award, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Lannan Foundation, and the MacDowell Colony. An avid world traveler, Raboteau resides in New York City and teaches creative writing in Harlem at City College, once known as “the poor man’s Harvard.” She is married to fellow author Victor LaValle.
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