<em>Florida</em>, Full of Dread

Florida, the newest book from the transcendent writer Lauren Groff (Arcadia, Fates and Furies), isn’t a short-story collection so much as an ecosystem. Within its boundaries, panthers prowl, snakes abound, Spanish moss dangles “like armpit hair,” children are abandoned to turn strange and almost feral, and storms batter so hard they leave bruises. The line between humankind and nature blurs. Groff’s environment is so sentient it seems to breathe; smells are “exhaled into the air: oak dust, slime mold, camphor.” But her characters are passive, watchful, having long ago learned the futility of fighting the elements.

Florida, in , is