Woodworm

if the movie the hourglass sanitorium is a dream, woodworm is a nightmare. they remind me of each other quite a bit though the themes are pretty different.

i have thought a lot about the house my great-grandfather built, which my grandfather lived in his whole life & raised my mom & her siblings. i see my family’s patterns of generational trauma and wonder if they were born in that house. the house that fell into decay and disrepair, the house that will be knocked down and will have only been occupied by my family.

i sometimes feel like i have a woodworm within me that can make me spill over in anger and regret and hatred, something that has always lived inside me & that i see in my whole family.

i have moved away and started my own life where i am happy and filled with love and gratitude, but in moments of frustration i know the woodworm is still there no matter how much i try to starve it of the negativity it feeds off of.

this book was an incredible depiction of generational trauma, rage, and class struggles that hit me deep. i think it will be even better on a second read one day & i am excited to return

A dark, dreadful story rooted in classism. Oh, and "witches"! An engaging read told from the perspective of a grandmother and her granddaughter who are bound to their house full of shadows, saints and the dead.

A entertaining short palate-cleanser of a horror novella, built on a multi-generational family story and feud.
I liked how the horror elements weren't actually scary, because the main protagonists treated them as mundane nuisances.

This was unfortunately a tough read for me. I wanted to like it and perhaps with a different writing style I would have but it did fall a bit short.

I'm not sure if it is the author or translators who made the decision to write without any punctuation like commas or quotations. It made it very hard for me personally to read. It did add a level of insanity to it but I feel it hurt the story more than benefiting.

I'll also be honest, I didn't catch on to their being more than one speaker until the near end of the book. It is told entirely as “I”. And by the end of the story I felt confused who was who. I'm sure if I re-read it now it'd click into place. But I hit like 70 pages in and went, “Wait a minute...” lol.

So it was ok overall. I feel like the writing style really hurt and took away from the story for me personally.