Woom

Product Information

The night that these two spend together is told in a series of vignette-style stories the two tell each other. About the book: The Lonely Motel holds many dark secrets... and Room 6 just might possess the worst of them all. Sandra Dinter (Leibniz Hanover, Germany), ‘“It’s like a TV planet that’s all about us”: Postromantic Childhood and Television in Emma Donoghue’s Room’, paper delivered at What Happens Now: 21 st Century Writing in English conference (University of Lincoln, 2012) The writing here is exceptional, and Emma Donoghue makes what could be an over-the-top plot into a character based and all too plausible story. It’s creepy and chilling and terrible and intriguing and kind of sweet. Mostly, it's all kinds of messed up.

In Room me and Ma had time for everything. I guess the time gets spread very thin like butter all over the world, the roads and houses and playgrounds and stores, so there's only a little smear of time on each place, then everyone has to hurry on to the next bit....”Moynagh Sullivan (Maynooth University), 'Mother and Child: Subjective Time, Space, History in Emma Donoghue's Room,' keynote delivered at ACIS (University of Miami, 2015). Malcolm Jones, ‘No Exit’, Newsweek, 9 September 2010, http://www.newsweek.com/2010/09/09/books-a-room-with-no-view.html

I respect the author’s choice to write a dark-themed story narrated entirely from the perspective of a five year old boy. While the unreliable narrator is nothing new in literature, its deployment here felt fresh and so I give points for that. Shyla tells a story about a customer of hers who wanted her to sit on his face and essentially smother him. She does this, he loves it. She also tells a story about how she has an extra deep/wide/long vagina bc she was repeatedly raped with a baseball bat as a teen. Again, this is not in graphic detail. This is why she became a hooker, to pay for medical bills from the above incident and because she is unable to be satisfied by an average penis. She is unable to have children bc of the incident. The amazing introspection of a child in an exceptional situation that endures it thanks to the love of a mother and human adaptability.

Book Summary

This is dark stuff. This is uncomfortable stuff. This is a story about a horrible person doing horrible things. It should have punched me in the core and twisted me up in knots. Woom” by Duncan Ralston is just one of those short stories you have to read it to believe it. I love horror as it’s my favorite genre to read but when it comes to extreme horror, this one definitely pushes the envelopes to realms that will definitely offend readers. Johnny is bitter and angry with the world. He wants help for his anger issues and responds to an ad that claims to help with that. He meets some weirdo hippie types. They drive him out somewhere isolated and wrap him up in a carpet and he has to wiggle to the top to get free, like a rebirthing experience. He does that, it doesn't work, he leaves pissed off. It is this story I'm pretty sure that Shyla figures out that Angel is Johnny. Once upon a time there was a young prince who believed in all things but three. He did not believe in princesses, he did not believe in islands, he did not believe in God. His father, the king, told him that such things did not exist. As there were no princesses or islands in his father's domains, and no sign of God, the young prince believed his father.

I’m so happy to see Emma Donoghue was the screenwriter who adapted her own book to big screen. With the powerful performances that reflected the emotional depths of the characters, we realistically resonate with the compelling traumatic situation the mother and her child are getting through. Marisol Morales Ladrón,‘Psychological Resilience in Emma Donoghue’s Room,’ in National Identities and Imperfections in Contemporary Irish Literature: Unbecoming Irishness,ed. Luz Mar González-Árias (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), pp.83-98. Also the whole talk about Shyla not getting pleasure from a normal sized penis since she doesn't have a cervix because her vagina is so long is not true. After a Trachelectomy the vagina is shorter not longer. Whether we like it or not, birth opens the gate of death. Between the sentence lies the path of life, traveled by all beings, and no one gets out of here without some kind of mental or somatic souvenir. While some manage to heal their wounds, others may spiral into madness during the process.I never would have found this if I hadn't read a friend's review on here talking about how gross it was, so thanks, Tim! :) I still think Emma Donoghue achieved an amazing job by telling this compelling story with her unique voice. Especially reflecting a captive young boy’s voice is the most challenging thing and argumentative subject. But she tried something unique, complex and she reached to our hearts and minds at the same time!