Danel Mason’s North Woods is one of the strangest novels I’ve read over the past year. Sororicide? Check. Mediums communing with ghosts? Check. Beetle reproduction from the point of view of a beetle? Check. Yet, it’s a thrilling read. Strange, but it held me rapt all the way through.
Taking place over three centuries on one properrty somewhere in the Berkshires, this novel observes the struggle to live fully in a world populated by the competing, often conflicting, desires of lives around us. Not just human lives, but the whole of the natural world. Mason plays out these struggles and follows them through to their inescable end in the death of the individual. But this is a not a bleak book. Each life leaves behind an imprint, and each new life lives itself out in this strange, often beautiful inheritence. I left North Woods heartened.