A Forest, or A Tree by Tegan Moore
My rating: 4/5 cats
WELCOME TO DECEMBER PROJECT!
this explanation/intro will be posted before each day’s short story. scroll down to get to the story-review.
this is the FOURTH year of me doing a short story advent calendar as my december project. for those of you new to me or this endeavor, here’s the skinny: every day in december, i will be reading a short story that is 1) available free somewhere on internet, and 2) listed on goodreads as its own discrete entity. there will be links provided for those of you who like to read (or listen to) short stories for free, and also for those of you who have wildly overestimated how many books you can read in a year and are freaking out about not meeting your 2019 reading-challenge goals. i have been gathering links all year when tasty little tales have popped into my feed, but i will also accept additional suggestions, as long as they meet my aforementioned 1), 2) standards.
if you scroll to the end of the reviews linked here, you will find links to all the previous years’ stories, which means NINETY-THREE FREEBIES FOR YOU!
2016: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show…
2017: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show…
2018: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show…
reviews of these will vary in length/quality depending on my available time/brain power.
so, let’s begin
DECEMBER 15
“Wait.” Piper opened her eyes. “I’ll be here alone?”
“Don’t worry, Pip,” Elizabeth said. “Nothing bad ever happens in the woods during daylight.”
despite having such low ratings on here, i needed to read this story for myself.
that cover:
that synopsis:
Four young women go on a camping trip. Things slowly begin to go wrong.
that opener:
It was just the four of them, four girls alone in the forest.
“Everything is dicks,” Elizabeth said. She gestured at the gnarled gray trunks rising bare-limbed into the shade of their own canopy. “I mean, look around. Dicks, dicks, dicks.”
how could something with this many ticks in its “pro”column be anything but wonderful? although, to be fair, this kind of wide-eyed optimism could have gone as poorly for me as it did for the characters in the story:
Nobody except Ailey had ever been backpacking before. But probably they’d all be fine.
AND YET! i found myself loving most of this one. true, some of the dialogue/banter was mildly irksome, and some of the Big Horror Moments skirted a firm commitment by using that lovecraftian thumbed-nose; describing a figure, the details of which her eyes could not negotiate, which is a thing you KNOW i don’t like. but i, for one, loved the ending. or nonending. and i know i give a lot of four-stars cats around these parts, because i upround and think beyond my own personal enjoyment into the larger sphere of “can i identify a reader for this?” the review space is mine, all mine, to work out my own issues, but the stars cats are for eeeeveryone (LGM), and i am using my precious review-space-words to declare my “more-than-like” for this one; loving all but a few parts, which is true of everything i’ve ever read and everyone i’ve ever known, so that seems a pretty fair judgment.
i love you, be safe and unpoked.
Elizabeth’s voice took on a storyteller quality, oracular. “At night, the Stick Indians creep up to people’s tents and push a stick through the flap and poke the people inside. Think about it: You’re sitting, it’s right before bed, you’re minding your own business, and all of a sudden this branch comes sliding into your house, all silent and slow, and just pokes you.”
read it for yourself here:
https://www.tor.com/2019/06/26/a-fore…
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