If you’ve ever trekked into them, you well know: They are as vast as they are enigmatic. The ancient Northern California coastal woodlands vibrate; they form a storied landscape that is an echo of lessons, witnessings, and warnings passed forward.
That territory is not just the preternatural setting for Allison Mick’s atmospheric, labyrinthine novel, Humboldt Cut; it also serves as its coprotagonist (and, at points, as its formidable antagonist). The terrain is at once breathtaking and terrifying: Countless souls wander into its thick “dark awnings” never to reemerge. “These woods operated on a timeline too vast to acknowledge urgency,” the narrator forewarns us in the book’s earliest pages. “When death feeds life feeds death in concentric rings across millennia, there’s no real difference between the two, between anything.”
Something’s amiss in this forest. Through a narrative latticework, braiding science, myth, and suspense, Mick reminds us, time and again, that the forest keeps a chronicle: “It’s all about regeneration.” The forest is memory. It’s alive but incessantly threatened. Its battle to save itself from visible peril is taking place now, by any means necessary.
The novel’s human protagonist, Jasmine Bay, hails from those woods—is of them—though she’s long tried to shed them. Now residing 300 miles away, laboring through dreary shifts in an Oakland hospital psych ward, she’s come to accept that her own mental health is tenuous. As a Black woman, she’s worn down not just by the petty hierarchies at work but, too, by life’s slow grind: microaggressions that have bloomed into day-to-day contests for baseline respect. Add to that the news cycle horror of yet another “Say Her Name” casualty trending on social media: “I have to watch the corpses of murdered women who look just like me turned into memes,” she tells an orderly, Henry (her slippery “situation-ship”), who has a crush on her. It’s a stockpile of disregard and grief that has crushed her sense of worth. Jasmine’s depression isn’t just a touch of the blues; it swallows her whole. She becomes the depression itself.
At the apex of her personal crisis, Jasmine is pulled back to the far north, to Humboldt County, for a funeral. Her forest-loving godmother, Virginia (Aunt Gin), who raised her and her brother, James, after their mother’s own mental disassembling, is to be memorialized, her body returned to the earth. Jasmine’s presence is nonnegotiable.
Returning to her small town of Redcedar, a “sea of overwhelming whiteness” aside from Aunt Gin’s group of friends, only intensifies her disaffection. And reuniting with family and childhood friends offers anything but succor. Even her plan to take Henry, as an ally, fails to shield her from the interrogation she’s anticipated. There’s flinty tension between her and James, who gets by as a lumberjack, taming and clearing their homeland; his work is a betrayal of her godmother’s teachings about the sanctity of the forest. “Aunt Gin always called shrubs and herbs ‘woody pioneers.’… [They] made room for redwoods,” Jasmine remembers. Now, tallying the savage clear-cutting that’s stripped her hometown, she reflects, “At least woody pioneers didn’t have to kill everything in their path to make room.”
While still hewing to the conventions of speculative fiction and fantasy, Humboldt Cut concerns itself with the heart, what we carry deep within us—not just the tangible, calculable weight of day-to-day encumbrances but the surreptitious burden—what’s embroidered into us, what’s passed on through blood. Moving across centuries, generations, and a wildly changing and climate-embattled California landscape, Humboldt Cut is as much about the wild turns of nature and the tangled secrets of family ties as it is about what it means to steward and protect—to love with one’s “whole heart.”
Told in three parts, the narrative is dense, variegated. Mick leaps briskly through time and shifts points of view. With a nod to Richard Powers’s sprawling The Overstory (whose words serve as the epigraph), Mick’s forest is awake. Restless. It sees. It listens. It weeps. “It seemed wrong,” Jasmine concludes, “that something so big and powerful was struggling for survival the same way she was.”
With ornate flights of world-building and backstory, Mick’s lens is wide. We ride the lumberjacks’ skyline, traveling over the loggers’ methodical work—50, 100, 300 years ago—into a near-future “score-settling.” Mick’s strengths are in creating an immersive world in which we learn as much about the cycle of forest life as we do about the instruments and strategies that serve to hasten its death. Throughout, she evokes a haunting, vividly sentient forest floor, a world that feels distinct yet out of time, its own planet on Earth: “So little … [light] filtered through the dense canopy that the forest was in perpetual twilight, flattening and desaturating colors until everything took on the tone of a vintage daguerreotype photo.”
Through Jasmine’s own family tree, we glean the rancorous history of the region, of its contested California landscape. We trek the territory her forebears crossed, recoil from violence they endured (enslavement, rape) side by side with the cruel deforestation enacted upon the land. We begin to understand Jasmine’s bone-deep trauma, the score her body has kept—the entire stow of her family’s generational trauma.
What is this generation’s obligation to the past? The scope of its duty to love and protect? Or, as the poet Lucille Clifton ruminated in these sharp, spare lines: What does it mean to call oneself a steward, not just of lineage but of the land?
people who are going to be
in a few years
bottoms of trees
bear a responsibility to something
besides people
At its best, Humboldt Cut casts revelatory light on those shadow histories; it conveys a more inclusive narrative of place—the stretch of the unchecked press of the frontier movement, the blood sunk deep in its soil.
One wish: that the novel’s final section was as well paced as those preceding it. The book’s latter chapters feel constrained by repetitions, embroidered retellings, and underscored details Mick has already squarely and vividly revealed. Overburdened, the prose loses its dreamy languor and with it the full punch of its crescendo. Still, this doesn’t negate the ambition, nor will it impede the conversation the narrative should provoke.
As a result of the cycle of settlers’ unchecked thirst and violent waves of erasure, Mick’s text warns, there will be a terrible comeuppance—retribution. Our climate calamity is, of course, not when but now. Those echoing, deleterious effects have already left their mark on the ecosystem, including, perhaps most significantly, our very own bodies. As Jasmine’s odyssey confirms, “time doesn’t change things; you have to do it yourself.”•
Lynell George is an award-winning Los Angeles–based journalist and essayist. She has been a staff writer for both L.A. Weekly and the Los Angeles Times. Her work has appeared in various news outlets including the New York Times; Smithsonian; Vibe; Boom: A Journal of California Preservation; Sierra; Essence; and Ms. She was selected to be a University of Southern California Annenberg/Getty Arts Journalism fellow in 2013 and received the Huntington Library’s Alan Jutzi Fellowship for her studies of California writer Octavia E. Butler in 2017. She is the recipient of a 2017 Grammy Award for her liner notes for Otis Redding Live at the Whisky A Go Go. George is the author of three books of nonfiction: No Crystal Stair: African Americans in the City of Angels (Verso/Doubleday); After/Image: Los Angeles Outside the Frame (Angel City Press); and her most recent book, A Handful of Earth, A Handful of Sky: The World of Octavia E. Butler (Angel City Press), published in 2020, which was a Hugo Award finalist in the Best Related Work category in 2021.
