The harsh, dazzling setting seems to be one of the few things to which the characters react with much awe or emotion-but for me, their ambivalence toward so many other aspects of life comes at a cost. Cook’s prose is at its finest when she trains her eye on the natural world. One of her most compelling concerns in The New Wilderness is the corrosive force of individualism, and how pedestrian the human tendency to destroy really is-how the hardwired urge to self-preserve erodes the possibility of fellowship and forward thinking.

Read Full Review >Ĭook remains as dubious of our species’ trajectory as she was in her rich and original short story collection, Man V. More than timely, it feels timeless, solid, like a forgotten classic recently resurfaced - a brutal, beguiling fairy tale about humanity. But in a novel about how humans might survive when stripped of a modernity that’s gone too far, maybe that’s part of the point: Even the most beautiful sunsets and sage fields become boring when they’re all you have. That pace flags only occasionally, usually during descriptions of the landscape, which are frequent enough to become slightly tedious. It makes a story that might have languished in the valley with its characters move at a brisk pace. Any time we begin to get complacent in the Wilderness State, Cook remakes the universe, shifting the point of view, the time frame, the physical landscape or the emotional one. Cook is a skilled unpeeler of information revelations and discoveries are timed to perfection. Here, we get both: This manages to be a speculative novel about the future and a well-researched tale about living primitively, arrowheads, hides and all. It’s hard to read all this during a pandemic of a respiratory illness caused by an airborne virus without feeling an extra chill, but Cook has always excelled at rendering horror plainly, whether that horror is monstrous or merely human.

Cook has deepened and expanded on the concerns first aired in her stories, like a fresh mountain stream running inevitably into a deep, cold lake.

Diane cook the new wilderness review