I once read an article about national parks from a popular online news source that really caught my attention. I’m a person who at that time, had visited a national park exactly once in my life. But this piece exposed the destruction of the Giant Sequoia trees and the potentially devastating climate impact. The images were crushing. Charred husks of lost trees, smoke wafting off the ground. Some of the trees lost during that wildfire were thousands of years old, so by that logic, even if they’d begun replanting at that very moment, it would take just as long to recover.
That led me down the proverbial rabbit hole. I began to devour everything I could about national parks and the role the trees play in protecting the environment. I read about theories on how the trees, together with fungi, had formed their own communications network. I mean, this was fascinating stuff. As a writer, I believe setting is a character that deserves as much attention as their human or alien counterparts.
It was easy to imagine crafting a story in a national park setting. And none was more interesting to me than Sequoia National Park. Towering giants older than most things on the planet, pristine rivers, flora and fauna that don’t exist anyplace else. My hope was to create not only a great story for readers but to also highlight the importance of preservation. This was the case for The Canopy Keepers, what would become the first novel in my Scorched Earth duology.
It is with these thoughts in mind that I’d like to share 5 of my favorite novels set in national parks, either real or imagined.
The Ritual by Adam Nevill
Horror fans of this novel, now a Netflix Original movie, will recognize the remote Swedish forest setting that serves as a nod to any of their lush national parks. It’s vast, untouched by human development, and aside from the supernatural entity, has all the same wilderness and natural beauty. This setting presents that perfect sense of isolation for four friends that decide to go on a hike to reconnect, as they’ve lost touch after their college years. But as the challenges and gruesome occurrences keep piling up (think horrifically mutilated animal corpses and a house where human remains and artifacts point to ritualistic deaths), we find out things aren’t quite what they seem between the friends. I won’t tell you who survives, but the ending was a satisfying one.
The Wild Wood by Charles de Lint
This stunner of a novel is set in the pacific northwest, a land green and lush. Though it doesn’t name one outright, with its dense forest, clear streams and bountiful wildlife, it has all the trappings of a national park—the forest, the streams and rivers, and wildlife. This is very much a national park, albeit a mystical one. The protagonist, Eithnie, chooses to go there for the same reasons most of us do, to escape and to be lost in the tranquility. Eithnie is an artist who has been plagued by disturbing dreams of faerie and their images even creep into her work. In a secluded area of the forest, she discovers that the faeries are suffering, and it is up to her to find a way to save them. Themes of conservation are also heavily woven throughout the narrative.
Devolution by Max Brooks
In this horror genre-bender set near Mt. Rainier National Park in Washington, a volcanic eruption isolates the eco-community known as Greenloop. The setting features everything you’d expect—beautiful deep forest, remote and rugged terrain. But after a disaster, the group finds themselves completely cut off. Everything from communications to their weekly grocery delivery, gone. And their idealistic community finds that more disaster awaits. You see, they’re not alone in the woods. A tribe of big-foot creatures threatens them. Told through the journals of the main character, Kate Holland, we experience how the group challenges their initial idealism, the slow realization of the threat they face, and their struggle to survive.
Trail of Lightning by Rebecca Roanhorse
While the novel is set in Navajo Nation, that includes parts of national parks like Canyon de Chelly. The canyon reflects the novel’s themes of resilience, and the intersection of the supernatural and natural worlds. Images painted on the canyon walls depict the lives of Native Americans that have called these canyons home for nearly 5000 years and also serves as the setting for the novel’s climax. In the post-apocalyptic setting of Dinétah (the ancestral homelands of the Diné people), gods and monsters have the run of the place. But monster hunter Maggie Hoskie has inherited the clan powers that are the only thing that stands in the monsters’ way. Maggie and Kai, a medicine man, have a particularly good scene where they enter the canyon to hunt a monster that has been terrorizing the local community. Having lived many years in the southwest, I appreciated the desert setting and the protagonist in Maggie. The loss of her family, the fact that what she’s good at isolates her, as well as her own moralistic questions about the violent nature of her role as monster hunter all make her a layered, complicated character.
Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer
The Southern Reach Trilogy by Jeff VanderMeer begins with Annihilation. I knew that Area X, the setting for the novel, was in Florida, but what I didn’t realize is that it is set in St. Marks National Wildlife Refuge. Here, a group of four women venture into this area, cut off from the rest of the world, to map the lay of the land, document their observations, and unlike the group that preceded them, survive to tell someone about it. This is a novel where the setting really spoke to me. An untamed wilderness with eerie, otherworldly flora and fauna, with remnants of human habitation littered throughout, it’s almost as if a national park was re-asserting itself and reclaiming the territory. The continuous ecological transformation challenges our understanding of the natural world.
Bonus: The Overstory by Richard Powers
Technically speaking, this book isn’t set in any of the world’s national parks but because trees are at the center of each of the stories, this book took my breath away and I had to include it here. It’s a longish read, featuring five trees whose lives intertwine with nine people.
As different as they are, all of these novels do a fantastic job of using national parks as settings while incorporating fantastical elements that continue to draw in readers.
