Ariel Courage’s debut Bad Nature is a delightfully cynical road novel with an unforgettable unlikable protagonist.
Publishers Weekly wrote of the book:
“Courage debuts with the devilishly alluring tale of a terminally ill New Yorker who embarks on a road trip to kill her abusive and long-estranged father. . . . The layered narrative grows intriguingly complex as Hester approaches her destination. Readers will find this a surprisingly moving portrait of a deeply wounded woman.”
In her own words, here is Ariel Courage’s Book Notes music playlist for her debut novel Bad Nature:
My debut novel, Bad Nature, begins with Hester, the nihilistic narrator, embarking on a cross-country road trip to get revenge on her abusive father. Hester has many weird qualities, foremost being a hatred of music. This, to me, is the ultimate sign of her perversity: What kind of freak goes on a long drive without good tunes?
True, I don’t usually listen to music when I’m writing, which is its own kind of journey. For brain-work I need silence, or the kind of white noise supplied by electric fans, whiny apartment radiators, and ambient city street traffic. Even so I enjoy creating playlists to supplement the text. To maintain a consistent tone throughout a single long project, I need tone-cues or mood-reminders, which music can provide. I also tend to think cinematically, so when I’m out for a walk or on dull errand-runs, I entertain myself with imagined scenes, often set to whatever I’m listening to at the time.
For Bad Nature, the mood was grim and intense. I wrote the first draft mostly during the summer of 2020—prime pandemic time—when I was lonely, stuck in place, and unusually doomstruck. It didn’t take much for me to find Bad Nature‘s pitch at first, but by the time I began revisions, I’d started to build out a soundtrack of sorts.
E Is for Estranged – Owen Pallett
Owen Pallett’s rich, musically multi-layered work typically comes with built-in narratives; most of his albums are high-concept and character-based. This song is from Heartland, which is about a farmer named Lewis and his antagonistic relationship with his creator. Even though it’s Lewis’s song, I think of it as Hester’s, too, given its themes of estrangement, bitterness, and the inevitability of fate.
ScubaZ – The Vanishing American Family
During the time I was writing Bad Nature I was watching a lot of Adam Curtis documentaries, his later political work as well as his more anodyne early BBC shorts. I was, for a time, very taken with his style of explaining the world. The Vanishing American Family is on the soundtrack for Hypernormalisation;as soon as I heard it, I paused the video so I could look up this eerily hypnotic song. Hester is from a vanished American family of sorts, so it became part of the book’s score.
Yanka Dyagileva – For a Black Day
I studied Russian in college. It was, frankly, a miserable slog. I mumble and misspeak even in English; foreign languages have never come naturally to me. Only in the final weeks of study abroad did I get remotely good at it, and I dropped it entirely as soon as I got home, hoping to forget both the language and the humiliations of trying to master it, but only succeeding in the former.
Whenever I feel bad about those youthful years of wasted effort, I like to remember that at least they led me to Yanka Dyagileva, my favorite Soviet punk-folk songstress, whose depressive mien is a little like Hester’s. Then again, she also appears on the Hypernormalisation soundtrack, so I would’ve found her regardless.
Pixies – Wave of Mutilation (UK Surf)
I’m usually biased in favor of whichever version of a song I hear first. This is one of the few exceptions. The original is rendered in the Pixies’ usual punky tempo, but the sedateness of this one is better suited to the lyrics, which put me in mind of Hester’s self-destructiveness.
Magnetic Fields – Lonely Highway
Can’t write a road trip novel without at least one proper driving song. This one’s jangly upbeatness becomes lightly ironic against its somber lyrics, delivered in Stephin Merritt’s affectless bass: “And as I hurtle down the highway / Past the factories and the graves / I think of all the years I wasted.”
Foxwarren – Lost in a Dream
Andy Shauf, the lead vocalist for Foxwarren, was another artist I listened to on repeat during the pandemic. Something about Shauf’s gentle, melancholic awkwardness reminds me of John, the eco-activist hitchhiker Hester picks up during her travels. It may also have something to do with Shauf’s rural Christian upbringing, which John shares.
GG Allin – Dead Flowers
Never met a rendition of this song I didn’t love. I was torn between this and the Townes van Zandt cover, my personal favorite, but the rawness of GG Allin reminds me of college basement punk shows, which crop up in Bad Nature as part of Hester’s undergraduate memories. GG Allin is also faintly ridiculous—he’s just so mad—in a way that bears some resemblance to Hester, and, like Hester, he too had an abusive father (though by all accounts GG’s was worse).
SZA – Kill Bill
This song came out in 2022, well after I wrote Bad Nature, and it’s almost too cleanly produced for my taste, but the toxic lyrics are very Hester, both in her jealousy over her one ex, Caleb, and in her general unwillingness to get over anything.
Sir Chloe – Wrath
“I’d rather stay mad” pretty much embodies Hester’s personality.
Beck – Ramshackle
“Jack-Ass” is the best track on “Odelay,” but “Ramshackle” is a close second, and puts me in mind of every depressing, run-down place Hester passes through on her westward path—all those “flypaper towns / stuck together.” It’s good outro music for the movie version of the book that lives in my head. As someone commented on YouTube, “This is the perfect end credits song.”
Ariel Courage is a graduate of the Brooklyn College MFA program, where she was editor-in-chief ofthe Brooklyn Review. She’s currently an assistant fiction editor at Agni. Her short work has appeared in Guernica, New Limestone Review, and The End. She was also a 2019 Kimmel Harding Nelson resident.