IFComp 2024 review: House Of Wolves by Shruti Deo

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(cover art by Mango Azalea)

My clinical-sounding and admittedly cynical summation of House Of Wolves by Shruti Deo might be, "Depression Quest but shorter and with you forced to suffer at others' hands as well." I correctly predicted what kind of experience was ahead when the first choice I picked from three offered basically said, "You can't do that yet, pick a different choice." Then the second choice I picked said, "You can't do that either, pick a different choice."

This is a mostly metaphorical(?) Twine piece that looks to me about being completely depressed, broken and non-functional, hiding these facts from the world, and also being in an environment of zero care or flexibility and where you are forced to go against your own wishes in terms of what you want to do, or when, or even what to eat. This manifests as having a round of chores to do each day, unsatisfactory eating supervised by some unspecified They at night, and visiting three other storylets on the way.

The storylets were the best parts, I thought, because they offered specificity. They approached character and situation. Learning, friends, college, those kinds of things. Returning to the House Of Wolves at night returns the prose to heartfelt but too generic prose of the dirge of hopelessness. That is what most annoyed me about this piece in the end, its non-specific version of hopelessness. I know I've made this same criticism of many other pieces of this type over time.

I also didn't understand the wolf metaphor. I am extraordinarily glad it all ended on a note of hope, but it doesn't actually feel like it should. There's not much hope on the way, so the end feels like a deus ex, and I view this shape as the outcome of both thematic and writing problems.

Paradoxically, content warnings don't have to evince much detail before I find fault with them, and this piece's were highly detailed and did it no favours. Too long, too much detail, robbing the piece of surprise, overstimulating the listed effects before they'd even been attempted to be executed by art. Shopping-listed out of their context, I felt worse from the content warnings than I did from the fiction itself. This is a reminder of one of many reasons I don't believe in what are called trigger warnings, or overly specific content warnings. I believe they make people over-believe in their own vulnerabilities. They do that and they spoil stuff, too.

House Of Wolves was plainly not my cup of tea, and I regard its trajectory as unsatisfactory, but it does have a simple grace of execution and presentation on its own terms.