Wilderness Tales

Literature scholar Fuss (Dying Modern) wrangles 40 stories into this excellent anthology focused on the American wild. Introductory bios provide evocative details and critical insights about the authors, such as Ambrose Bierce, who was born on the Ohio frontier and whose work has inspired contemporary writers of weird fiction. Bierce’s “The Eyes of the Panther,” about a woman’s nocturnal encounter with a wildcat, boasts the strangely precise details he’s known for (a character bears “the expression of a poet and complexion of a pirate”). Lore of another panther features in Lauren Groff’s “The Midnight Zone,” in which a mother and her two boys try to rough it on their own at a deserted Florida camp where a panther was rumored to lurk. In “Pond Time” by Gretel Ehrlich, a woman travels to Alaska in search of her deceased husband’s daughter, whom he fathered with another woman decades earlier. Ehrlich beautifully conveys the impact of the intense landscape on the narrator’s psyche (“the footings of reality were loose”). In Annie Proulx’s tense and layered “Testimony of the Donkey,” hikers Marc and Caitlin become lovers in Idaho, bonded by their devotion to nature and driven apart on the trail by an argument. Short fiction fans will find much to chew on. (Feb.)