Diane Cook: “Our humanity is what makes us so particularly wild.”
I first encountered Diane Cook’s writing in 2014, when I read the title story of her collection Man V. Nature. Years later, the feeling of being lured into that eerie story—ostensibly about three old friends who get stranded on a lake while on a weekend fishing trip, but really about survival, pettiness, power—remains fresh. Balanced on the knife-edge of absurdity and mortal danger, Cook’s writing manages to be both funny and terrifying at the same time, its soul the darkly transfigured stuff of life itself. The rest of that collection—featuring stories of baby-stealing bogeymen, flooded post-apocalyptic worlds, unseen monsters feeding on corporate executives—was just as strange, hilarious, and profound.
Cook’s debut novel, The New Wilderness, lives in the same surreal territory of physical danger and existential dread. Bea and her five-year-old daughter, Agnes, seek refuge in the Wilderness State, the last swath of protected land in a future America that is on the brink of environmental collapse. Together with eighteen other volunteers—the Community—mother and daughter live as nomadic hunter-gatherers, part of a study to see if humans can co-exist with nature. We follow the intrepid, bickering community as they wander through the grand country, crossing treacherous rivers, braving injury, battling hunger and thirst. As in Man V. Nature, however, the true peril lies within. The farther the community roams, the fiercer the power struggles become among its members, and the sharper the cruelty in the name of self-preservation.
Reading this novel, I was reminded of the writer Namwali Serpell’s conception of using different genres as lenses, to refract and layer reality. The New Wilderness is an ecological horror story; a mother-daughter love story; an ensemble disaster story; and much, much more. It grapples with questions of wilderness and belonging, taking
