The Backwoods

I went into The Backwoods not really sure of what to expect. I'm a sucker for stories of city-slickers going into the woods where bad things happen, so I knew the book had potential. A big city lawyer goes to the sticks to visit her newly widowed sister. Violent troubles follow that are somehow tied to an insular backwoods clan known as The Squatters. If it were a movie I'd rent it for sure. What I wasn't sure about was the author; Edward Lee.

I'd heard good stuff about the extreme horror of Edward Lee for years, of course. But I hadn't really liked what 'extreme horror' I'd read. Porn-y sex (which I don't have a problem with and honestly kind of like) and gut-bucket violence have their appeal, but aren't really enough to carry an entire show more novel. Hearing these two elements advertised as his virtues, I was a little skittish. I just expected crappy writing of the Richard Laymon variety. (I like Richard Laymon and all, but I can't read two books by him back-to-back.)

Well, I have to say that I really like Edward Lee's narrative style. It is quality, sure-handed writing; with atmosphere out the wazoo and depth of character. All the things that were missing from the last (and decidedly mediocre) extreme horror novel I read.

The Backwoods really captures the feel of a small rural town in Virginia. You could practically hear the cicadas buzzing day and night in Agan's Point. Dialogue and dialect were done well. Reading it, you could hear the accents in your head, though it wasn't so heavy handed that it became a pain to read. The Squatters were handled very well. Though the book didn't go into a lot of detail about them, what was presented showed that Edward Lee had done some homework. These weren't a bunch of ignorant, toothless hick stereotypes.

His characters (well, the main ones anyway) were three dimensional and felt 'real'. I can accept two-dimensional cardboard characters in some horror. My love for the genre allows me to overcome it. But it always a pleasant surprise when a horror writer can create characters with depth.

When I was first introduced to Agan's Point's portly police chief Sutter (who is in a doughnut shop!), I was fully expecting to have to put up with a parody of Sheriff Buford T. Justice. Edward Lee managed to take these shaky beginnings and really turn this character into a person.

Our heroine, Patricia White has issues returning to her home town. A place she'd left decades earlier and hoped to never see again. Yeah, she is the sort of horror standard 'hero with a troubled past', but Mr. Lee is able to fill in enough details and give her the illusion of a life outside of the story. Touches like her feelings for her husband (who stayed at home) made her feel like more than just a vehicle to carry the story.

Not all of the characters are as fully formed as the sheriff and Patricia. I did notice that any secondary female character was invariably a knock-out, whether they be a prostitute, a secretary or even a coroner. But overall I'm impressed with his characterization.

The only place where The Backwoods failed for me was in its pacing. While I really enjoyed the writing, in the middle of the book, it felt like Mr. Lee was delving so far into his characters that he was losing forward momentum. Once Patricia arrives in town the book slows down to a crawl and really does take quite a while to get going again.

The book was entertaining enough that I kept wanting to read through the slow parts, but it would have served the novel better if Mr. Lee had paced the thing out a bit better. Instead we have a great beginning, a soggy middle and then a good ending (with a twist at the end that was cool, but made no real sense).

Having read this book, I know I will be reading more Edward Lee. I picked up two more of his books as I was reading this one. Slow middle section aside it was a very enjoyable ride. show less

Interesting story that kept me riveted to the book. The ending is totally unexpected, yet logical - in a twisted way.

The Southern descriptions are superb - making me remember my own youth. Cicada's are a central part of the book - the ever buzzing insects that elicit both repugnance and aphrodisiac ecstasy.

Everything is a buildup that lashes out like a plume of fireworks - you don't expect the explosion to be so loud. Lee is a master of horror.

Well color me surprised. This was not the amazing, twisted Edward Lee book I imagined it would be.
Guess maybe I should listen to those reviews a little more, huh?
I really hoped they were wrong.
But nope.
I was.
The ony thing that kept this book from being a one star review was the writing. It was pretty decent most of the time, with the exception of some strange narrative intrusions here and there.
The set up for the story seemed pretty solid, but holy crap...what a lifeless plot. Zero narrative tension. Basically a series of female wet dreams loosely tied together by a dopey wrap around story involving real estate and a strange "ancient" tribe of squatters that need to leave the land so condos can be built. Yawn.
The whole thing is show more preposterous and more tragically, boring.
Lee tries his hand at injecting some Laymonesque fun into the proceeding by using the word "nipple" as often as possible, but even the sex scenes come off as flaccid.
To make matters worse, Lee adds an epilogue that somehow manages to make a truly horrible ending to a terrible book even worse.
That's some sort of accomplishment in itself, I suppose.
It's a shame, because I think all the ingredients were here for a really good book, but alas - this isn't one.
Nothing to see here, folks...move along. show less

Edward Lee, well known for his demented horror and rich sexual imagery, delivers a rather strange book focusing on a small town dominated by crab picking ‘squatters’. The squatters are about as unusual as you can get ­ when they speak you barely see their mouths move, they’re amazingly short, the women possess eerily appetizing bodies, and they’re all living together on a type of plantation in oddly structured abodes. And of course people such as this practice a different kind of religion that causes all us normal folk to raise an eyebrow or so.

The main character in all this, though, isn’t a squatter. She’s a lawyer, which can be just as bad. Beautiful, intelligent, and protective of her sister, Patricia is back home, show more pushing away painful memories, and suddenly being overcome by strange sexual urges. Her character is real enough to be believable, and her overall demeanor was likeable. Backwoods is told through multiple points of view, with her dominating the show. Characters in general were interesting enough and didn’t harm the story.

The plot is bleak, strange, a bit depressing, certainly dark - demented Lee style. He never promises happy endings. It’s not possible to guess who will bite the big one and who will live ­ or even, really, who the real friends are. While starting as an intriguing mystery, too much was let out in the beginning. As a result the mystery alone wasn’t the reason to hang on. But have no fear, for horror fans rarely want to read horror to have a mystery, instead they want terror and they certainly get it here. Several scenes are disturbing, gruesome, with not much held back.

Overall this was an entertaining read about an unusual culture, with a captivating main character, sexual tension, and chilling scenarios. On the bad side the very ending let me down a bit, as it seemed cut off and overly grim. Also, I never fully got the sexual urges Patricia experienced; more information in this area is welcome.

If you’re a fan of Lee or bizarre horror, be sure to check this one out. show less

It might not seem like it to first time Edward Lee readers but BACKWOODS is a much more subdued novel than most of the stuff that Lee writes. It has large quantities of sex. It has violent scenes that make you cringe. And it combines the two into different rape scenes by obviously despicable characters. However the majority of the acts are subtle and not quite as in your face as other Lee novels.

The story follows Patricia White who comes back home to the backwoods of Virginia after her sister Judy's husband is murdered. While her deceased husband was a slime ball, Judy is still taking his death hard. Hard enough that she doesn't notice many of the strange things that are happening in town and within the crab processing plant that she show more owns. Essentially an evil real estate developer is trying to buy some land from Judy so he can build condos. However Judy won't sell because it would leave homeless "The Squatters", an uneducated but friendly group of superstitious people who live for free on her land and work cheap in her crab processing plan. Evil real estate developer decides killing The Squatters is the right way to drive them off the land; meanwhile The Squatters strike back using supernatural means.

The supernatural aspect is very much underplayed and almost an afterthought at times. A larger focus is placed on how evil some people can be and the creative ways to kill people. While a little predictable and populated by flat characters, the book is still enjoyable and a good read. There are a few points where you wonder if people can really be that stupid but that happens in real life too so I didn't question it. show less

A very fun read. The charachters are drawn out very well. There is to much sex and most of the women are described as being built like a brick shit house, and it is supposed to be a good thing, it doesnt sound being very good to me. The pacing is a little off, but the ending was completely unseen.

In Backwoods, Patricia White is a successful lawyer from Washington DC who goes back to her childhood home in the Chesapeake Bay area to comfort her sister after her husband is killed. As the title of the novel suggests, this is a complete backwoods underdeveloped place filled with squatters that seem like they belong in Deliverance. It was also the area where Patricia had been raped when she was younger. She discovers a crooked land developer who is trying get rid of squatters and creating all kinds of mayhem in the process.

The level of writing in this novel was not particularly impressive. The storytelling is also not cogent. It’s basically a way to fit as many sex scenes into a story as humanly possible. If that’s your thing, show more then have at it, but if you want a story that makes sense and characters that are relatable, then you will probably want to avoid this novel.

Carl Alves – author of Blood Street show less