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I watched most of “Gone Girl” through my fingers and screamed so loudly in “Scream” that my neighbors complained. In other words: I always thought I didn’t like thrillers. But then my friend and colleague Kat Rosenfield sent me an early copy of her grizzly, disturbing, completely fantastic new novel, “How to Survive in the Woods”—and I was obsessed from the opening line.
You might know Kat from her Free Press articles, in which she surveys the culture with a sharp eye—commenting on everything from the hypocrisy of Hollywood to the politicization of absolutely everything. Unsurprisingly, her new novel is very zeitgeisty. It’s the tale of Emma Sharp, a girlboss raised by a prepper—who, after establishing a multimillion-dollar nutrition business, crashes out and ends up in a relationship with a very controlling man named Logan.
She starts to think he might kill her one day.
And then she meets his ex-girlfriend, Taylor, and together they decide: They should kill him first. The perfect scene of the crime? The woods of Maine. Specifically, the secluded final stretch of the Appalachian Trail, at the end of hiking season.
“How to Survive in the Woods” is out March 10 (but you can preorder now!)—and it’s our pleasure to publish an exclusive excerpt today, in which Logan, Taylor, and Emma arrive in the woods for a journey that, if all goes according to plan, should be his last.
Of course, not everything goes to plan.
One last thing, before you dive into this addictive story: Kat’s launching her book in New York City on the evening of March 10 with Suzy Weiss—and you’re invited! It’ll be a great conversation between two of our most entertaining columnists. Get your tickets here! —Freya Sanders
“The hotel is just up here,” Taylor says.
They’re passing into a neighborhood where old but neatly maintained homes sit up close to the side of the road; Emma sees freshly painted trim, a few front gardens, clusters of hydrangea bushes still clinging to the faded pinkish remnants of their summer blooms. The speed limit drops from 55 to 30, and over the next rise Emma sees the town, which is hardly a town at all but a cluster of buildings lining either side of the road, extending for maybe a quarter of a mile. There’s a red barn with “ANTIQUES” painted in huge block letters on one side, and a municipal building, and a tiny post office. There’s a long and sunken-looking storefront that must have been a trading post once upon a time but now houses some sort of gallery, and a Victorian house with a peaked roof and bay window and a placard out front that reads: “GENERAL STORE.” The row of buildings on the west side of the road backs up to a lake, and thick stripes of late afternoon sunlight are beginning to slant gold between the buildings and across the road.
The hotel (Emma cannot believe Taylor called it this with a straight face) is on the second floor of one of the buildings whose foundation seems to have sunk at the center, giving it the slightly off-kilter look of a crushed milk carton. While Taylor and Logan go to pick up supplies from the general store, Emma peers through the dusty windows of the restaurant on the ground floor—it looks closed, or maybe it’s just too early—and then circles the building twice in search of an office, a person, anything. The second time, she emerges back onto the sidewalk to find a dark-haired, bearded man waiting for her, sitting on a wooden staircase that runs up the side of the building and looks like it’s one hard step away from falling off. A lit cigarette dangles from his lips, and he’s wearing a flannel over a bright-green novelty T-shirt that says “margaritas made me do it.” On someone else, the shirt would be a joke, the kind of thing you wear at parties as an ironic joke. This man, with his unkempt beard and intense, close-set eyes, does not look like he gets invited to parties.
“Are you the manager?” Emma says. “I’m checking us in.”
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