Bad Nature

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Description

Armed with a terminal diagnosis, a grudge, and a rental car, forty-year-old Hester sets out to fulfill her lifelong dream of killing her absent abusive father in this brilliantly subversive and bleakly funny novel What would killing him accomplish Nothing, mostly. Then again, neither would letting him live. It's Hester's fortieth birthday when she's diagnosed with terminal cancer, and she knows immediately what she must do- abandon her possessions and drive to California to kill her estranged father. With no friends or family tying her to the life she's built in New York City, she quits her wildly lucrative job in corporate law and sets off. She hasn't made it far when she runs into John, an environmental activist in need of a ride to different superfund sites across the United States. From five-star Midwestern hotels to cultish Southwestern compounds, the two slowly make their way across the country. But will the revelations they make along the way dissuade Hester from her final goal Ragingly singular and surprisingly moving, combining tragic intensity and pitch-black humour, Bad Nature is the incendiary debut novel from Ariel Courage. Part road trip, part revenge tale, part a lament of our ongoing ecological crisis, it's ultimately a deft examination of the indulgence of holding grudges, moral ambivalence, and the eternal possibility of redemption.

Reviews

'Add Hester to the canon of unlikeable female characters I cant look away from, and Bad Nature to novels I couldnt put down. Dark, aloof, disciplined this novel is reminiscent of the best of Ottessa Moshfegh or Emma Cline. I thought it was brilliant.' * Mary Beth Keane, New York Times bestselling author of Ask Again, Yes *
'Wicked and wickedly funny, Ariel Courages debut Bad Nature is a dark romp of a book, a road-trip novel propelled by a revenge plot. Nihilism and optimism collide in this story featuring a woman who is simultaneously confronting her childhood and her death. Hester is a caustic yet irresistible narrator, and this evocation of her journey across America reads as both hate mail and love letter to a complex country. Bad Nature is raw, intense, and absolutely mesmerising.' * Helen Phillips, author ofHum *
'Bad Nature is a rare gift; an audacious, insane, and relentlessly American first novel. Ariel Courage casts halogenic light upon the only question still worth considering in these, the earliest days of our extinction: What are we to do with our wretched time left A propulsive, often terrifying remaking, through gray-eyed and perfect metaphor, of the nihilist manifesto, the road-trip tale, and the revenge plotall, stunningly, at once.' * Alexander Tanner, author of Worry *

Author Bio

Ariel Courage is a graduate of the Brooklyn College MFA program, where she was editor-in-chief of The Brooklyn Review. She's currently an assistant fiction editor at AGNI Magazine. Her short work has appeared in Guernica, The New Limestone Review, and Works Progress, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She was also a 2019 Kimmel Harding Nelson resident.