Review: Two Short Stories, First a Lot Better Than The Second
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 02 22, 2012
David Gaughran's If You Go Into the Woods contains two stories, the title one and the Reset Button.  I liked the initial story, it's short (about seven minutes long) and is written Grimm's Fairytale like, in that it sets the scene but doesn't waste time getting you to know what's behind Jiri being a depressed lonely child, why he has no father, and why his mother is of the deadbeat variety, scaring her son constantly as she just sits around bursting into tears.  Gaughran could have gone into more details with the background but that would only have you left wanting more for the payoff. What was there was only there to get Jiri into the woods and explain why he feels a need to satisfy his well being by going there. With the start being left simple, the unanswered questions that the reader obviously still has in their mind after Jiri encounters what he does are acceptable to have as they fit in with the overall tone of the story.With the second story, The Reset Button, which is slightly longer, probably about a ten minute read, I found the opposite was true.  Again Gaughran only vaguely tells us what's going on, but because there's some bizarre stuff happening already such as his wife getting mad he didn't take their son to the zoo in the middle of a snowstorm, you've got too many questions from the start.  This ones basically about a guy who has lost custody of his son, rarely gets to see him and copes with it by hitting his local bar.  However he's getting frustrated that no one seems to care enough about his existence to remember what he orders, what he's told them about himself, even though he remembers everything they've told him while making conversation in the past.  The ending doesn't make a great deal of sense to me, the title of the story makes you form a theory after you've read the final sentence but there's bits in the story contradicting that being the case.  The second story was just very unsatisfactory to me.I give the title story 5 stars, the second just one, simply because it didn't make any sense to me.