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Reading Laird Hunt’s In the House in the Dark of the Woods is an experience of frustration, as the text offers a tentative formulation of various traumas. As the reader discovers the unreliable narrator’s punctured text, she may feel a destabilizing tension between an almost necessary sympathy towards the narrator as the oversensitive victim of violence—both physical and psychological, which caused her lasting frustrations—and the rejection of the morally reprehensible aspects of her behavior. As writing is ostensibly given as a source of freedom in the novel, what kind of light does it shed upon Hunt’s literary enterprise? This paper explores the staged questioning of freedom at different levels: the freedom offered to the characters by writing, the freedom offered to the writer through embedded writing practices that highlight their own limitations; the reader’s freedom at last, of adopting the right distance towards the narrator who appears alternately as the aggressor and the victim, and thus of endorsing the responsibility of the ethical questioning carried by writing―and reading.