SOURCE: "Date with a Wolf Man," in The New York Times Book Review, January 31, 1988, p. 22.

Johnson is an American novelist, educator, critic, nonfiction writer, cartoonist, short story writer, and scriptwriter. In the following mixed review, he provides a thematic analysis of the short stories collected in The Consolation of Nature.

The novelist Valerie Martin's first story collection, The Consolation of Nature, is a book with an eschatological message. "Death is not the end of life but the enemy of life," she writes in the book's last story, "Elegy for Dead Animals." This is not a story at all but the author's brief essay on her lifelong identification with animals and plants, and on such subject as "our tenacity to life, our terror of death." These concerns loosely bind her other stories, a couple of which occasionally generate suspense and capture the terror of nature and the nearly paralyzing...