At the Edge of the Woods
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
“Balances wonder and disquiet with incomparable grace and precision…Ono continues to captivate.” —Bryan Washington, author of Memorial
In an unnamed foreign country, a family of three is settling into a house at the edge of the woods. But something is off. A sound, at first like coughing and then like laughter, emanates from the nearby forest. Fantastical creatures, it is said, live out there in a castle where feudal lords reigned and Resistance fighters fell. When the mother, fearing another miscarriage, returns to her family’s home to give birth to a second child, father and son are left to their own devices in rural isolation. Haunted by the ever-present woods, they look on as the TV flashes with floods and processions of refugees. The boy brings a mysterious half-naked old woman home, but before the father can make sense of her presence, she disappears. A mail carrier with gnashing teeth visits to deliver nothing but gossip of violence. A tree stump in the yard refuses to die, no matter how generously the poison is applied.
An allegory for alienation and climate catastrophe unlike any other, At the Edge of the Woods is a psychological tale where myth and fantasy are not the dominion of childhood innocence but the poison fruit borne of the paranoia and violence of contemporary life.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This haunting, memorable tale from Ono (Echo on the Bay) follows a father and son living at the edge of a whispering forest. In the present day, the father raises his son in an unnamed country where he'd moved with his wife. After she returns to their home country to await the birth of their second child, the father contends with strange phenomena, as though living in "a peculiar abyss of time and space." The forest beyond their house seems to speak, letters never arrive, and the letter carrier regularly changes size and shape and blames the missing mail on imps. After the narrator's son wishes for a grandmother, the pair is visited by a half-naked old woman tormented by memories of her husband and the son they conceived during a war. With allusions to France, a nearby farmer recounts the death of his older brother, a "Resistance" member betrayed by neighbors. And both the narrator and his wife encounter long caravans of migrants, people who "no longer had a home and were forced to wander, lost, forever." Eschewing chronology and plot, Ono's immersive narrative accrues insights about the nature of violence and mercy. It's an accomplished work by a masterful writer.
