Daniel Mason’s novel North Woods gives more detail to elm bark beetle sex—”he touched her. First her frons and then—oh God—her epistome”—than to any sexual encounter between its human protagonists (309). Weird as this is, Mason’s often wry, often reverential writing proves that our surroundings are just as strange and wonderful as anything we can dream up. His exploration of the interplay between humans and their surroundings illuminates how the past is all around us. Lustful beetles, hardy apples, and various ghosts of New England each show the importance of our history in this meandering story.

North Woods unfolds from the early years of western Massachusetts’ English colonization up to the present day and slightly beyond, centered on a section of forest eventually circumscribed in the fictitious town Oakfield of the Berkshire Hills. The human protagonists of the book therefore only live for a few chapters, illustrating the limits and opportunities of woodland retreat for those fleeing colonization, enslavement, homophobia, and ableism, but also the promise of the land’s wild setting, filled with apples, vibrant wildlife, and historical discovery. Indeed, the land is the clear protagonist; while many chapters present human perspectives as letters, songs, case notes, and even true crime tales, most chapters use third-person over-the-shoulder or omniscient narration that places human activity firmly within the category of all living things going about their days. While the story clearly follows the patterns of land use in northeast north America over the past few centuries, the continuation of several characters as ghosts maintains a consistent human thread in the story and grants several plots slightly surreal endings.

The development of these humans alongside the shifting landscape is the joy of North Woods. Though the first of Mason’s protagonists view themselves as “Nature’s wards,” leaving behind “England” and “colony,” they only bring themselves into “Indian paths through groves hollowed by fire,” landscapes just as inhabited and influenced by humanity (16-20). And if the humans always change nature, nature changes humans back, as Mason shows with an untended apple inspiring a familial orchard and the calm of snowy woods enabling queer liberation. Mason endows nature with humanity, inviting readers to indulge in the ecstasy of fungal spores on the wind and the confusion of beetles finding their mates. When a 1970s protagonist questions whether her brother could similarly engage in “corporeal,” “human” acts with his “endless exegeses on the ways of beetle and moss,” therefore, it is with all the dramatic irony that the reader has recently seen beetle and spore reproduction as inseparable from humanity (386). Indeed, the book’s standout arcs place individuals who appreciate the land—an ex-colonist closer to her deceased husband’s “Praying Indians,” a queer painter searching for sanctuary with his love, and a boy isolated by his commitment to honoring the land’s ghosts by recording them—against those who would eradicate wildness and its inhabitants. Those who love the North Woods always clash with those who would find safety within or extend that safety to others.

In this palimpsest of wildlife and ghosts, it’s not always easy to find the colonized humans for whom the refuge most matters. Though Mason never lets the reader forget Native existence and colonial genocide, there are no Native main characters; while one chapter peers into antebellum New England from the perspective of a cynical slave-catcher, there are no Black main characters. North Woods thereby elides the agency of these two groups, both tremendously important to New England’s development (for Black history in New England, see David Guzman's review of Black Lives, Native Lands). In a book with over-the-shoulder views inside rotting apples and on air currents above the clouds, I would have also liked more perspectives from humans of different societal relationships as well. But if North Woods doesn’t add much to the discourse on Indigenous and Black resistance, its web of connections to genocidal conflicts like King Philip’s War nudges the reader to remember the need for such resistance.

Ultimately, Mason’s novel contributes most to New England canon by juxtaposing the violence with the fierce love characteristic of the rocky landscape, and it’s this remembering that makes the supernatural element most generative. Through his ghosts’ righteous challenges to would-be despoilers of the forest and their freedom to fully revel in their love after death, Mason limns the sublime woods with the mundane and vice versa. North Woods shows one cycle in the grand tangle of life, one centuries-old story of the woods and why they matter, and that’s certainly worth getting lost in.