The Natural Way of Things is a savagely, unapologetically feminist book; a throwback to writers like Joanna Russ and Angela Carter, who landed blows on the patriarchy without worrying about being labelled man-haters ... The Natural Way of Things is chillingly dark and unfashionably didactic. But it’s also compulsively readable, and bears its load of significance with effortless power. The fury of contemporary feminism may have found its masterpiece of horror.
Set in a dystopian backwater, her short, gripping book begins as an allegory of thuggish misogyny then evolves into a far stranger and more challenging feminist parable ... What keeps all this from seeming doctrinaire is the book's sheer imaginative intensity. Wood's writing crackles with vivid precision.
A haunting parable of contemporary misogyny, The Natural Way of Things is The Handmaid’s Tale for our age of sensational media and reality television ... Like the surreal prison itself, Ms Wood’s writing is direct and spare, yet capable of bursting with unexpected beauty.
Wood understands the nuances of misogyny ... To some, The Natural Way of Things, as an allegorical novel, might seem a bit on the nose in terms of how it tackles misogyny, particularly slut-shaming...But this frankness is key. Wood’s novel becomes much more urgent if it isn’t read as an allegory or as a dystopian world ... What sets The Natural Way of Things apart, what makes it a truly urgent read is that it is not an allegory and it is not a dystopian novel: it is a reality. As such, The Natural Way of Things, a work that takes the reality of misogyny and toxic cultural notions about women’s sexuality and very bluntly bulldozes those ideas, is exactly what we should be reading right now.
