4/20/2025 5:49 PM CST

Dear Reader,

In honor of a holiday that is, in many ways, about rebirth and transformation, I thought it would finally be appropriate to write a review of Duncan Ralston’s Woom.

No promises of blogs to come this week. No big news. That is next week.

For now, let’s keep it simple and enjoy this review. It has been a long day, and I want to go enjoy the holiday with some Easter grass.

 

The Lonely Motel Gives Birth to Tales of Disgust and Anguish

Review: Woom – Duncan Ralston

My Verdict: Great characters. Pushes you toward an inevitable ending. Not as intense as I anticipated, but more than earned its reputation.

 

Sometimes, it is love at first sight.

I know that I am late to the party on this one. But I must do my obligatory Woom review. There are some books that you know you are going to like even before you have read a word. Maybe it’s the cover. Maybe it is because you heard someone speak enthusiastically about the book, and they gave you just enough detail to whet your appetite. That was this book for me.

A couple of years ago, I began to realize how out of touch I was with the modern horror scene because I started writing horror myself, and when trying to pitch my first book to agents, it was disheartening because I never knew what titles to compare it to (for you non-authors, agents want comparable books to yours that came out in the last 5 years), and I never had any references that weren’t 20 or more years old. Not only was this frustrating in my process of trying to find an agent, but I felt like a hypocrite. Here I was, wanting to break out into the horror market, and I didn’t even know anything about it.

I turned to various horror book YouTubers to remedy this issue. I wanted to know about the modern names in horror. I stumbled upon Anda Kent, and I think the first or second video I watched was one titled, “I read your EXTREME horror book recommendations, and now I'm suing.” Nearly every book mentioned in that video caught my attention, but especially a book called Woom. Partly it was something about the cover, partly it was the way Anda talked about it, but whatever it was, I walked away from that video knowing that I wanted to read Woom and that I was most likely going to like it.

Watching the video again, I don’t agree with her assessment of the book other than that it is generally good, and I am not sure exactly how I got certain impressions, but early on I understood a few things. I understood that it was based around a hotel room, that the title was both a mispronunciation of the word “room” and a reference to the womb, and I also knew, somehow, that the story was Chuck Palahniuk adjacent. Maybe I heard someone else compare the work to Palahniuk? Chuck is my second favorite author to King, and I had this nagging idea that Woom would match stuff like Rant, Haunted, and Invisible Monsters step for step.

I didn’t buy the book because I was bone broke and didn’t yet know the wonders of the digital book discount offered by most indie authors. Some time passed, I discovered Books of Horror on Facebook and kept hearing about how intense Woom was, and I kept making the promise to myself that I would order it soon. When I saw it for a killer deal in digital, I snatched it up without hesitation.

I was right. I liked it.

So, here is the deal. When a book has this kind of reputation for being disturbing, I am not quite sure that it can ever quite live up to whatever vague depravity you can loosely conjure in your head at a moment’s notice. Something about putting concrete words to paper softens the power of the imagination, if ever so slightly. I am not sure what I thought I was going to see in this book, but I half expected my sanity to be undone simply by the combination of words contained on its pages. That didn’t happen, of course, but it was nothing to sneeze at either. Was this book disturbing? Yes. There is one scene I cannot think about without physical sensations of defensive fear wracking my body. I am shaking ever so slightly as I type about it. The slightest bit of fight-or-flight adrenaline kicks in every single time I think of a belt sander now. Thanks, Ralston.

What can I say about Woom that hasn’t already been said? I am not sure, but I will give it a shot anyway. I have not read many in-depth reviews, so excuse me if I am repeating things everyone has already heard. The basic breakdown is that a man named Angel is returning to a hotel room that is central to his life in many ways. He hires a sex worker of certain proportions, Shyla, because he has very specific plans for the evening. Angel tells Shyla stories about the room and the awful things that have happened in or around it while he prepares her for his end goal. The book takes place in a series of vignettes that jump back and forth between stories and the two of them talking, often sharing their reactions and feelings about the story. As details are slowly revealed, the story comes to what I felt was an inevitable conclusion with a hint of more violence and depravity to come.

Ok, so why did this book work so well? Why did this book reach the audience that it did? The first and main reason is because Ralston gets us to like his two main characters. Angel and Shyla are very sympathetic, especially Shyla. There is something about the way she is written that makes her hard not to like. Maybe it’s the way she listens to Angel’s stories without judgment, or maybe it is her no-nonsense attitude. Angel should be unlikable for the things he has planned, but even he ends up being someone I felt a ton of empathy for. The interplay between them only serves to make the reader even more invested in the duo. For a relatively short book composed of even shorter stories, Ralston manages to make the main characters of each piece relatable in that limited time. Not always likeable, but human.

Another reason I think the book works and has done so well is the relatively strong thematic throughline. I am not sure I agree with Anda Kent’s assessment that this book is “pretty surface level.” With little exception, most every part of the book resonates strongly around a couple central themes: Birth, Death, Sex, Disappointment, The Divine, Mothers, Being Scarred By Our Pasts, Rebirth.

Now, I am not sure the presence of strong theming is a guarantee of depth, but I think the book could and should be explored further. Unless someone has already done it, I think Woom actually begs for in-depth analysis. Maybe I am wrong. Maybe it is all surface-level stuff. But I think Woom is saying something. With the references to Jonah and the Whale and the obsession with birth/rebirth and pain of both the physical and emotional variety, I feel like I know what Woom was saying, but more emotionally than intellectually. Kind of like a David Lynch movie where I may have a hard time articulating the point, but I can tell you that I feel the point. I think if somebody studied the book, looked up a few references, and made a few guesses at Ralston’s intent, there would probably be a compelling essay in there.

Of the stories, I appreciated “Woom,” “(S)mother,” and “Man(nequin)” the most, and I felt that they were thematically cohesive. These stories started to nudge toward that conclusion that felt so inevitable. Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t really know where this was going at the beginning, and it’s hard to say when it finally dawned on me, the idea that Ralston had been subliminally planting even from the title alone, but by the time “(S)mother” was over, let’s say I had the gist of it pretty firmly, and I was not at all disappointed when the climax played out the way it did in the final chapter. There is a reason Angel looks the way he does.

My only real complaint is that the story “Pro(lapse)” felt out of place and kind of robbed the overall book of a certain sense of completeness. Unless I am missing something here, it didn’t feel as resonant or in place with the rest of the stories. I see that it is a conclusion to the first story, but beyond that I kind of missed the point. However, I am glad it was there, because that is the story that confirmed my Chuck Palahniuk suspicions.

Like I said, I think a scholarly analysis of Woom could prove fruitful; I just don’t think I am the guy to do it. Somebody smarter than me should give that a shot. I am just telling you, there is substance there.

If I gave you my best armchair articulation of what Woom is saying, it would go something like this: Sometimes places and moments in our lives contain so much trauma that those haunted locations and awful events form like an emotional chrysalis around us where that painful confinement destroys part of our old self and gives birth to who we are to become.

If you haven’t read Woom yet, what are you even doing? If you heard that it is vile and repugnant, it is, but don’t let that deter you. If you’ve read any of Palahniuk’s more extreme works, you will be fine. You might not look at belt sanders or traffic cones the same again, but you can live with that.

“Do you think… places… absorb bad things?... Because bad things happened here.”