I first read this book in a community college literature course I was taking to defer my student loans. I remember fighting viciously with the instructor for most of the course, being frustrated to tears by one student’s sheer, unrivaled stupidity and need to comment, and feeling generally frustrated by all of the things happening around me those months just on principle. This book was one of the few bright spots.

It’s macabre. It’s meandering. It’s maddeningly elusive and yet it’s right in front of your face, all at once, and it’s one of my favourite books. I even said so to the instructor at the end of the class, when I said that he had been a good sport considering that I’d given him grief all term, and I appreciated the fact that I had read In the Lake of the Woods because of him.

In the Lake of the Woods raises the question of how well we really know other people, including ourselves, and it illustrates that no act of magic is perfect, that an attempt at total erasure is not always guaranteed to work out.

I love the almost violent emotions that John feels about his wife, describing wanting to climb inside her viscera, or holding the flesh of her waist so tightly that it pinches, just a beat too long, leaving his wife with an uneasy feeling. He wants to devour her, to eat her up, even as he is being eaten by madness. Quite a thing.

I love the layered alternate versions of the story which nest on top of each other while the real version glides silently through the book, dropped in hints and murmurs which are so subtle that you might miss them, if you aren’t reading carefully. I enjoy books that force you to slow down and absorb every word, every scene, every moment. I can see why our instructor chose this book, because it’s so complex and layered that it screams for analysis, even if it is just a woeful community college English class that mauls it and picks through its bones.

There’s a faint hint of Vonnegut in this book, what Vonnegut would be if he was good, wasn’t a hack. It’s a subtle angry shifting spicy sickly green sort of book, and maybe I love it so much because it shows human nature at what I see as its truest, harsh and cold.

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In the Lake of the Woods, by Tim O’Brien. Published 1994, 303 pages. Fiction.