While I was reading Matt Bell’s book Appleseed, two other wildly different novels sprang to mind: Annie Proulx’s Barkskins, an historical tale about the demise of extraordinary forests, and Kim Stanley Robinson’s speculative The Ministry for the Future, which imagines how certain people and governments will act as extreme weather becomes intolerable. And yet Appleseed is hardly a combination of the two. It stands on its own as a work that blends together myths, legend, and the supernatural as it explores where America once was and what it might become.

(Photo by S. Widua on Unsplash)