If you’ve never heard a pack of coyotes shrieking in the middle of the night and want to know what it sounds like, imagine a group of screaming teenagers. Sometimes when this noise wakes me up, echoing through the Los Angeles canyon where I live, I have to listen for a few seconds, my heart racing, before I can tell whether the screams are animal or human.
Coyotes and humans have long been adversaries—in many Native American folktales, coyotes are known as tricksters, deceiving us humans into bad behavior. They live not only in our legends but in our backyards, fearlessly wandering our neighborhoods and hunting our beloved pets. And yet, like many rivals, humans and coyotes have much in common. We call coyotes territorial, but we are invaders on this land as much as they are, if not more so. Coyotes are an extremely adaptable species. They have adapted to our roads, our hiking trails, our weekly trash pickups (read: weekly buffets). And humans, likewise, are exceptionally adaptable. COVID-19 showed us how easily we can slip into a “new normal” to survive.
Vanessa Hua’s third novel, Coyoteland, drops us straight into a Bay Area suburb, El Nido, a year after the initial outbreak of COVID-19, as humans and wildlife alike are trying to make sense of their new reality. The rotating cast of characters is led by newcomer Jin and his family, the only Asian household in a predominantly white neighborhood. Jin, like most of the characters, is still trying to piece his family’s life back together after the economic impact of the pandemic. His family’s plan to flip their newly purchased home for an investor immediately strikes a negative chord with their neighbor Blair. Jin and Blair are two of the primary adversaries in this story, although one could argue that Blair, the resident “Karen” figure, is adversarial with almost everyone. We also meet Ana, Blair’s nanny and housekeeper, who lives in terror of her abusive ex finding her and of not being able to afford her DACA renewal. Jin’s eldest daughter, Jane, along with Blair’s daughter, Quinn, and another of the primary teenage characters, Tasha, are all trying to survive the social maelstrom of teenage girlhood.
On the surface, we have a novel about privileged people behaving badly in the suburbs, with the lesser-privileged caught in the tailwind, and a few delicious moments of pettiness and clever revenge sprinkled throughout—mostly doled out by the teenagers. Going deeper, the coyote metaphor becomes clear: Blair and her family mimic the coyote’s territorial urges, seeing Jin’s family as invaders—Quinn says, “Total invasion. Invaders,” during a tense conversation to underhandedly refer to Jane—and Blair is quick to protect what she believes to be hers. She and Jin are similar in the ways humans and coyotes and other sworn enemies are similar: both strapped for resources, both willing to push moral boundaries for the sake of their families. Meanwhile, Ana is being hunted by her ex in the way that prey is stalked by a coyote—she can’t prove that she is being watched, but she can feel it, as if the hunter is hiding just beyond the giant walnut trees that line the neighborhood. All of the book’s parent groups are vicious to one another whenever anyone tries to wound their “cubs.” Jin and his wife, Kai, scavenge the local Buy Nothing groups and the free furniture lining the neighborhood curbs the way a coyote might scavenge human cast-offs. Tasha feels more at home foraging in the nearby wilderness than she does in school, and she is one of the only characters to actually go head-to-head with a coyote.
Another layer of the story is infused with the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic—specifically the lockdown. As I read—thinking how strange it is, and yet how inevitable, that we are now far enough removed from the first days of the pandemic that we can actually write stories about its ramifications—I was drawn to one particular motif in the book: the constant surveillance via screens. Blair owns a company that manufactures neighborhood security cameras, and she plants them everywhere under the guise of research, while in reality she’s using them to spy on her neighbors. Jin and Kai rent their house out on weekends to make extra cash, then watch the renters’ movements via cell phone from a nearby campsite. Quinn creates her own (fake) “Karen” persona called Becky White and records videos to troll racist white people who don’t realize they are being racist (or don’t care), while Jane and Tasha set up a nanny-cam operation to catch Quinn in essentially the same act.
Hua makes an interesting argument for one of the short-term effects of all those months we spent locked away: Like the coyotes, we adapted quickly to our new normal. We adapted to the screen as our primary window to the outside world. We became even more obsessed with watching one another than we were before. While the pandemic had measurable impact on a global scale—on the economy, on the debates surrounding vaccinations, and on politics—the lockdown itself affected us on a more individual level, forcing us into isolation, stuck behind screens, so that once we were finally released back into the wild, like newly escaped animals, we had to learn how to live with one another again. As Hua leads us through this neighborhood’s petty arguments and rivalries, we can’t be certain that the characters’ attitudes—and especially their prejudices—are worse than they were before lockdown, or if they’ve simply resumed where they left off before the world shut down. To me, this is one of the book’s central questions, and probably one of the central questions of any novel that deals directly with COVID-19: Was lockdown simply a temporary pause in humans going head-to-head with one another in real life, or did any of us actually learn something from it and come out differently on the other side?
In some versions of folktales, the coyote would disguise itself as a human in order to trick humans into doing its bidding. Hua slips into the mind of a coyote during several high-intensity moments in the story, including an integral part of the book’s fantastic, unnerving climax, but the animal remains the character we hear the least from. Perhaps with this novel, Hua is noticing that our lives are riddled with tricksters, with humans acting like coyotes and coyotes acting like humans. Maybe that shriek in the night sounds so familiar to us because we recognize a creature who, like us, is just trying to adapt to an ever-changing new normal.•
Jackie DesForges is a writer and artist in Los Angeles. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Off Assignment, the Coachella Review, Air/Light, and more.
