Book Review: If It’s The Birds, We’re In Trouble by L. Marie Wood
Genre: Weird Fiction / Sci-Fi Horror
Age: Adult
Format: Found File Case Book
This is a fantastic example of 'found footage' in book format, a collection of diverse material that creates an incredibly weird Sci-Fi Horror ensemble. Piecing together what's going on in Rothwood will take you to extremely creepy, rubber-reality places.
Personally, I find this style very effective for a Horror book, and especially for Weird Horror. It’s so immersive, and in reading what people have left behind – from archived social media comments to handwritten journals and drafts of essays for a sociology class – you step into a world where reality warps and twists around you.
There are poems from infected people, letters to loved ones, a school essay in several, progressively distorted and disturbing drafts, and a journal from the modern-day that ends up being printed in a magazine of the 1950s/60s where time is experienced as elastic.
What's going on in Rothwood? Is it aliens? Fallout? A time rip? A chemical catastrophe? All of the above?
I really enjoyed piecing it together and getting more questions than answers, and I think this is a book that will stand multiple read-throughs in linear and non-linear order.
It also left me with a lingering feeling of unreality and deep suspicion of my food as I tried to eat a sausage roll while in the middle of reading it... not the best choice on my part.
I think this would be best picked up as a print copy, and I will be pre-ordering one. The ebook worked for me with its embedded images, but I don't know how these work with screen readers/text-to-speech software. I would hope that there is alt text embedded, but as I don't use accessibility tools I can't vouch for that. I was able to enlarge the images and zoom in to read the text, and I enjoyed the different handwriting styles and fonts, and the quilted jigsaw feel of all the scraps of information, out of place and time, forming a strange and macabre set of witness statements.
If you want an audio way in to L. Marie Wood’s work, try The Ever After by L. Marie Wood on The Weird Library podcast, read by Bridgette Brenmark, with art by Bridgette Brenmark.
If you’re wondering what film to go for to get you in the mood for this one, or as a chaser to it, the central premise of this case book is a cross between Honeydew (2020) dir. Devereux Milburn, and Coherence (2013) dir. James Ward Byrkit, but it is very much its own thing!
Purchase Links
Undertaker Books / Amazon US / Barnes & Noble
Review by C.M. Rosens
Instagram, Threads, TikTok: @cm.rosens
Bluesky: @cmrosens.com
I received an ARC of this novel from the publisher in exchange for an honest review
