In a Dark, Dark Wood. Ruth Ware. 2015.
I don’t have, and have never really had, the bridal gene. I never dreamed about weddings as a child, and haven’t been especially interested in them since then. I’ve enjoyed other people’s weddings, as much as my introverted self ever enjoys large parties. I like love, and I like celebrating it. But there are a lot of ways you can do that. The modern Wedding-Industrial-Complex makes me nervous.
Weddings, and all of the social events (showers, bachelorette or hen parties, honeymoons, etc.) that go along with weddings, do matter a lot to many people though, and this fact is something that I admittedly struggle with. I kind of, deep down, don’t believe you people. I think you are all faking it! Because when you actually talk to people (women) about bridal stuff, what you discover is that they are rarely actually enjoying any of it for its own sake, but instead for what it gives them, or else they think they’re supposed to do it anyway in order to be women in the right way. If no one has ever told you, let me tell you, as I will tell my own children: there are no wedding laws and no wedding cops. You don’t actually have to do any of that shit. But for now at least, in the west at least, I fear I’m on the losing side. People don’t really like weddings, but they do care about them, and that is a very different and much more difficult thing.
All of this is to say that this is the third thriller-type book I’ve read this year that took place at or near a wedding, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence: I think it’s a setting that’s ripe for thrills and chills of various kinds. In all three of these books, a female protagonist travels to a creepy location for the wedding of an estranged childhood best friend, and some kind of violence ensues. Even before the violence, the protagonist does not want to be there. She has some kind of past with the friend, some old rivalry or jealousy or trauma, that made their friendship impossible and makes the journey back painful. In each case it is a journey back: the friend, the one getting married, stayed put in some way while the protagonist made her own life. The wedding is her return, one she would otherwise never make.
I think the obligation of weddings lends them to the thriller or horror genre. Even when we enjoy them as events, we’ve all been to ones we didn’t want to go to - and a wedding is a very hard thing to say no to, regardless of our feelings. There is always drama in a tension between what our feelings actually are and what we think they ought to be. Weddings are supposed to be joyful, and they’re supposed to be community and family practices, but so often we experience them as pure obligation to people we don’t especially like or care about. Writers - who might be disproportionately introverted - are especially prone to experiencing this tension, I think, because even in the best of circumstances we all kind of hate parties and organized fun.
Nora, the protagonist of this novel, is a writer, and it fits - I believe she’d be pretty miserable in this situation no matter what. I think Ware does a good job of showing her discomfort at a weekend hen party that likely would have been uncomfortable even if nobody got murdered (people get murdered). Unlike in The Jackal or When the Reckoning Comes, there are no racial or class tensions at play here, just run of the mill social tensions between people with secrets who don’t like each other, and there are pluses and minuses to that. It makes the novel a little flimsier; there’s less at stake. But it also throws the unbearable awkwardness of enforced socializing between those with the bridal gene and those without it into sharp relief. The wedding process itself, and all of the lingering and repressed miseries it necessarily brings to the surface, is the source of drama here. It does get the job done. The weekend hen party is truly unbearable; you can’t blame any of the characters for wanting to flee. You do read it and keep waiting for the other shoe to drop, which it does.
What I didn’t love is that the other shoe drops only about halfway through the novel, and the rest of the novel is spent with Nora finding out what really happened, mostly from a hospital room, mostly because people just tell her. There isn’t much drama in that - as believably unbearable as the prior tension was, I wish Ware had stretched it out longer, or made the action in the second half a little more robust. Once the social tension of the party is gone, you find there isn’t much to the story: no reason to really care what happens to Nora or anyone else. I could have done with more chapters of people saying the wrong things and embarrassing each other and making each other crazy.
The villain reveal was not especially plausible, though it was certainly predictable. There wasn’t much humanity in the estranged best friend, especially as I compared them to the similar characters in Jackal and When the Reckoning Comes. The reveal of the villain’s sinister plot was pretty weak. Still, I did finish it, and finished it quickly, which isn’t as faint praise as I’m making it sound. I think this would make a better than average movie, while it makes a fairly average novel. Ware knows what she’s doing. But all of the interest is in the first half of the novel, in Ware’s exploration of the ways that social rituals make us all lose our minds. Once that element is gone, I’m not sure there’s much there.