Novels with Wilderness Settings
The wilderness is a universally recognizable place to human beings, even if we’ve been born and raised in cities; it is our primal place of origin, and its patterns and spectacles are written into our DNA. This matters in literature, fiction especially, because stories set in the compellingly described primal wilderness tap into deeply resonant emotional responses. By writing and reading novels that acknowledge our inseparability from nature, no matter how dark the novel (and novels set in the wilderness do tend to be dark), we engage in a ritual of gratitude and healing. This kind of ritual is hard to come by in our screen-addicted twenty-first-century human society, and we urgently need more of it. We need novels that recognize and re-mythologize our place in nature. Novels that celebrate the beautiful, concrete, in-the-moment specificity of our existence on this planet. These kinds of novels can inspire us to affirm and strengthen our essential entanglement with nature, and in the process of writing and reading them, hopefully, we will become better stewards of the complex network of the planetary life that sustains us. As a bonus (full disclosure), I include my own soon-to-be-released wilderness adventure novel (which also happens to be a post-apocalypse time travel story), The Afterlife Project.
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