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Finding Woods
Horror writer Matt Mott invites you to experience three stories that will keep you awake and still and breathing. Breathing. Breathing.
Meet a family torn apart by a mother drowned. She will not let her son be, and her grieving husband will not let her go.
Meet a young boy on a mission in the woods. He thinks his imaginary friend may be a real witch, or at least her ghost. Either way, he thinks he knows where to find her.
And meet a woman obsessed with her shower. She thinks the trees are taking over, slowly replacing the town and its people, but just because no one else has any memory of the missing doesn't mean she's wrong.
Here, in his debut collection, Mott calmly takes you into the backwoods of New Brunswick, and then without looking back, he leaves you there to find your own way out. Be sure to mind the trees.
"Finding Woods is a tough, unflinching collection of smart horror. Matt Mott's debut collection will haunt you for days after you've put down the book."
Eden Robinson, Author of Traplines and Monkey Beach
Meet a family torn apart by a mother drowned. She will not let her son be, and her grieving husband will not let her go.
Meet a young boy on a mission in the woods. He thinks his imaginary friend may be a real witch, or at least her ghost. Either way, he thinks he knows where to find her.
And meet a woman obsessed with her shower. She thinks the trees are taking over, slowly replacing the town and its people, but just because no one else has any memory of the missing doesn't mean she's wrong.
Here, in his debut collection, Mott calmly takes you into the backwoods of New Brunswick, and then without looking back, he leaves you there to find your own way out. Be sure to mind the trees.
"Finding Woods is a tough, unflinching collection of smart horror. Matt Mott's debut collection will haunt you for days after you've put down the book."
Eden Robinson, Author of Traplines and Monkey Beach
164 pages, Paperback
First published November 11, 2014
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
August 19, 2015
Wow! Not my usual genre of leisure reading, but extremely pleasurable to lose myself in the writing and the characters on a warm summer night. I was hooked from page one and "got lost in the woods" with these three stories. If you've travelled through the province of New Brunswick, the place names will certainly be familiar. Check it out!
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August 8, 2023Different
April 5, 2016
"I get confused, but I try not to.
I help out in town. But I didn’t help Father. I tried, but he died. His name is Paul, just like Kevin’s Dad. Kevin says Dad, not Father, and I find it very strange.
Things happen backward. And they happen at the same time.
Sometimes I can tell the difference."
The author, Matt Mott (my personal coffee brewer for over a year) starts us off with a lurking, literary tone that was a joy to read. His detail and his “turned around” phrasing were efficient and creative. Very quickly, though, page two tilts us with two uses of capitalized West that have no business being capitalized. I stopped, said ‘huh’, and read the back cover and author bio. Writers who submit to The Fiddlehead and the Malahat Review do not make such basic mistakes. I assumed it must be intentional. As the story wore on and no further grammatical miscues emerged, my suspicions grew. As the unreliable style (see the supplied snippet) continued, I became entranced with this mystical form of writing. Intentional tense errors and more subtle capitalization. Take for instance, “I was sad to see him go. I would have at least imagined telling him about the trees.” A combination of indicative and conditional perfect tenses that does not technically work, unless you are intentionally trying to throw the reader off with difficult to pin down subtlety. And then there are the dozens of italicized words. He has two italicized sections. One is a letter, which makes sense, but the other is a normal section. Why? Is this an error or another functional jolt? And why the emphasis on key words? Was it a hidden message?
Finding Woods is a heavy story in three parts, the Riley part, the Kevin part, and the Jaimie part. It’s a story whose main antagonist is undefined, a nameless, formless, timeless one. A demon if you want to believe that, but it is never said. The author uses technique otherwise discouraged. He writes fragmented thoughts. He jumps between characters and voices, between settings, between times. His purpose seems to be to throw us off and never let us get grounded. The snippet provided is by this later-named ‘Anthony Perkins’ (which any horror fan will right away know cannot be the name of a demon but is the name of a horror actor (Psycho II) whose last movie was suspiciously called ‘In the Deep Woods’. And of course this demon had previously claimed to be invincible to humans. The author also belabors over details. Back and forth banter not saying much substantial but driving the reader into this back and forth void. Riley and his mother’s conversation could have take place in twenty words but it extends for pages. When we finally reach a climax with this girl (I think she’s a girl; she takes showers with the soccer players Andrew and Corey while in school, yet later he/she’s treated as a girl. Another back and forth intentional ambiguity?) Jaimie, and she is beside herself with sections of town and highway disappearing into trees which nobody sane notices, is obsessed with taking warm, comfortable showers washing herself of and reminding herself of the internal goo of a living creature. When we finally get to the Perkins, we’ve been driven into this interminable hole so deeply we have no other choice but to believe. Even when Anthony Perkins slaps (not stabs or cuts) Jaimie with a butcher knife, and she, the weaker female or male, knocked down and bleeding, somehow overcomes the unconquerable and slaps him to death with his own butcher knife, we somehow feel this is right and true, that events throughout the province of New Brunswick and chronicled in folklore have a root cause in this dead actor.
The book is even more exhausting than this review, but it works. It’s a great example of how form can dominate substance, and even though I could never believe any of the nonsense this book is based upon, I’m very glad I read it.
I help out in town. But I didn’t help Father. I tried, but he died. His name is Paul, just like Kevin’s Dad. Kevin says Dad, not Father, and I find it very strange.
Things happen backward. And they happen at the same time.
Sometimes I can tell the difference."
The author, Matt Mott (my personal coffee brewer for over a year) starts us off with a lurking, literary tone that was a joy to read. His detail and his “turned around” phrasing were efficient and creative. Very quickly, though, page two tilts us with two uses of capitalized West that have no business being capitalized. I stopped, said ‘huh’, and read the back cover and author bio. Writers who submit to The Fiddlehead and the Malahat Review do not make such basic mistakes. I assumed it must be intentional. As the story wore on and no further grammatical miscues emerged, my suspicions grew. As the unreliable style (see the supplied snippet) continued, I became entranced with this mystical form of writing. Intentional tense errors and more subtle capitalization. Take for instance, “I was sad to see him go. I would have at least imagined telling him about the trees.” A combination of indicative and conditional perfect tenses that does not technically work, unless you are intentionally trying to throw the reader off with difficult to pin down subtlety. And then there are the dozens of italicized words. He has two italicized sections. One is a letter, which makes sense, but the other is a normal section. Why? Is this an error or another functional jolt? And why the emphasis on key words? Was it a hidden message?
Finding Woods is a heavy story in three parts, the Riley part, the Kevin part, and the Jaimie part. It’s a story whose main antagonist is undefined, a nameless, formless, timeless one. A demon if you want to believe that, but it is never said. The author uses technique otherwise discouraged. He writes fragmented thoughts. He jumps between characters and voices, between settings, between times. His purpose seems to be to throw us off and never let us get grounded. The snippet provided is by this later-named ‘Anthony Perkins’ (which any horror fan will right away know cannot be the name of a demon but is the name of a horror actor (Psycho II) whose last movie was suspiciously called ‘In the Deep Woods’. And of course this demon had previously claimed to be invincible to humans. The author also belabors over details. Back and forth banter not saying much substantial but driving the reader into this back and forth void. Riley and his mother’s conversation could have take place in twenty words but it extends for pages. When we finally reach a climax with this girl (I think she’s a girl; she takes showers with the soccer players Andrew and Corey while in school, yet later he/she’s treated as a girl. Another back and forth intentional ambiguity?) Jaimie, and she is beside herself with sections of town and highway disappearing into trees which nobody sane notices, is obsessed with taking warm, comfortable showers washing herself of and reminding herself of the internal goo of a living creature. When we finally get to the Perkins, we’ve been driven into this interminable hole so deeply we have no other choice but to believe. Even when Anthony Perkins slaps (not stabs or cuts) Jaimie with a butcher knife, and she, the weaker female or male, knocked down and bleeding, somehow overcomes the unconquerable and slaps him to death with his own butcher knife, we somehow feel this is right and true, that events throughout the province of New Brunswick and chronicled in folklore have a root cause in this dead actor.
The book is even more exhausting than this review, but it works. It’s a great example of how form can dominate substance, and even though I could never believe any of the nonsense this book is based upon, I’m very glad I read it.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
August 25, 2015
It has been quite some time since I have read any 'modern' horror novels. Back in my younger years I was quite a fan of Stephen King, but as I got older my reading tastes changed to literature and history with the occasional novel or book of short stories thrown in for variety. Recently I was alerted to the fact that a Miramichi resident (who has since moved to Saint John) has written a book that I should take a look at. I was able to get a review copy of Finding Woods by Matt Mott (2014, Montag Press) from the author himself. On the back cover is a review quote I thought was interesting:
"Finding Woods is a tough, unflinching collection of smart horror"- Eden Robinson, author of Traplines and Monkey Beach.
Smart Horror
Smart horror as opposed to dumb horror, like all those Saturday matinée b-movies I watched and cheap horror magazines such as Weird, Eerie and Creepy that I read as a teen. Oh, there were some good tales in them, but they definitely lacked in intelligence. Then I started reading Edgar Allan Poe and H.P. Lovecraft whose stories, although written in a past age, had (and still have) the innate ability to worm their way into the mind and make you ponder the possibilities of the imagination. Matt Mott pays tribute to those master storytellers in Finding Woods.
You can read the rest of my review here: http://wp.me/p60sTD-8T
"Finding Woods is a tough, unflinching collection of smart horror"- Eden Robinson, author of Traplines and Monkey Beach.
Smart Horror
Smart horror as opposed to dumb horror, like all those Saturday matinée b-movies I watched and cheap horror magazines such as Weird, Eerie and Creepy that I read as a teen. Oh, there were some good tales in them, but they definitely lacked in intelligence. Then I started reading Edgar Allan Poe and H.P. Lovecraft whose stories, although written in a past age, had (and still have) the innate ability to worm their way into the mind and make you ponder the possibilities of the imagination. Matt Mott pays tribute to those master storytellers in Finding Woods.
You can read the rest of my review here: http://wp.me/p60sTD-8T
April 23, 2021
Nice to read something from a local author.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews