Man V. Nature (2014)
Diane Cook
257 pages
What a delightfully strange brew author Diane Cook has created for readers in the short stories she has written for her collection Man V. Nature. Over the course of these dozen tales we discover twisted realities that seem at once wildly far-fetched and yet unnervingly plausible, and into which Cook thrusts her protagonists, leaving them to flounder and struggle as twists of fate force them into confrontation with realities they resist giving in to. Ultimately, none escape the devastating consequences of their strange circumstances unscathed.
Ten of the stories are set in what amount to dystopic alternate realities. Rather than post-apocalyptic societies in ruins, however, Cook conjures worlds that for the most part appear much like that of our present day, altered with only with a particular, if crucial corruption to the social or natural order.In the lead story Moving On, for example, those who become widows or widowers must sell their homes and possessions and move into shelters, with separate buildings for women and men. Once there, guidance counselors encourage them to quickly move past their loss, and to learn new skills that will improve their chances of being selected as mates again, and so allow them to rejoin society. As the story opens, a widow prepares her house for sale, unwillingly submitting to the forced closure society imposes on her. In this world, the thoughtless consolation to someone who has lost a spouse --- “you have so much to look forward to, focus on your future” --- has become a legislated coercion, requiring her to forget her past life with her husband and all it contained, and look only to what comes next.
In that story Cook provides no explanation as to the origin of this social system centered on shelters for those who have lost a spouse. And in fact in all of the stories collected here such details were clearly beside the point. The dystopias she creates generally have no viable explanation that could support either the manner of their origin or the durability of their status quo --- the disorder she imagines seems to exist in a world like the ones found in the old TV show The Twilight Zone: a peculiar alternative reality fashioned within an otherwise familiar and normally functioning society or world, set-up to explore the implications of some element of human nature by taking it to a logical extreme.
Thus it is in the story Somebody’s Baby, in which a couple arrive home with their newborn to find a man lurking outside their house. We soon learn that the strange man appears regularly in the neighborhood, stalking the houses of families with babies, waiting for a lapse of a mother’s attention in order to kidnap her child. The new mother is shocked to find that her neighbors see the situation as an unavoidable reality. Parents work, food and health care seem readily available, everything in the society appears to be functioning normally, but the women in her neighborhood simply accept that they will lose some of their children to the kidnapper, as if it is a natural part of life, like a natural disaster, or an infection; they don’t move out, they don’t physically confront the man, they don’t seem to have recourse to some broader authority.
Similarly, The Mast Year opens benignly enough, describing a woman who has a period of success in her life, both at work and in finding a wonderful husband. Then one day shortly thereafter, she arrives home to find people camping outside her house, and, over the days and weeks that follow, she watches fitfully as their numbers continue to grow. It turns out that they are hoping for some of her success to rub off on them. Again the larger society seems to be functioning normally, but the woman and her husband apparently have no way to prevent or counter the invasion of their property. They must simply find some accommodation with the situation as it exists.
And so it goes in many of the stories in this collection --- understanding the origin for or the internal consistency of the settings is not the point. Rather, Cook uses the dystopic twists in these stories to create an extreme situation into which to place her character (or characters). The heart of these stories, then, lies in each character’s reaction to the particular challenges they must grapple with --- how will they struggle forward in the face of an implacable reality?
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