The Nature of Things

Emily Fridlund creates a palpable sense of dread from the very beginning of her fiction debut, History of Wolves . We feel that something terrible will happen. Has happened. By the second paragraph we come to realize that the victim of the terrible thing that will happen, or has happened, is Paul, an innocent four-year-old child. It is a nauseating realization. Our guide through the events is Madeline, aka Mattie, aka Linda, a fourteen, then turned fifteen-year-old girl who became Paul's babysitter one summer. She narrates the story from the vantage point of age thirty-seven, but she is seeing the tragedy of that fateful summer through the eyes of a teenager and still trying to make sense of it all. Linda, as she was mostly called, grew up in the woods of Minnesota beside a lake. It was an isolated spot that had once been the site of a commune, but, by the time that we meet Linda and her parents, only they are left living in a rundown, ramshackle, unfinished cabin and eking out a l...