Kat Rosenfield grew up spending summers with her grandparents on Sebec Lake, not far from where her latest thriller, “How to Survive in the Woods” takes place. Rosenfield’s signature hypnosis brings readers on a survivalist journey full of twists and turns.

The journalist’s fifth novel charts the demands of survival amid the awe and terror of Mother Nature. It also reckons with how the term, “survivor,” shapes narrative performance and the darker intimacies of an inner life. 

In a digital age where our identities stand in for self-branding, what parts of us stand to outlive our imprint? Rosenfield navigates the grotesque with suspense and grit to illuminate these darker corners of the human psyche.

Many of your novels are thrillers. What makes Maine the right setting for these psychological and potentially criminal events?

Outside of the romance of Maine, which is, of course, significant, Maine is one of the few places in the country where you cannot always get cellphone reception and internet. That is every thriller writer’s dream. The primary problem when you write this type of book is the existence of cellphones and the internet. You’re always trying to find a way to get people away from their phones. The 100-Mile Wilderness, where it is really difficult to get cellphone reception, as I’ve discovered myself when I’ve been hiking, was a great setting for that.

Emma is an influencer with all kinds of contemporary affectations. How did you decide that persona would be part of this novel?

I was interested in this novel encircling the idea of survival and what it means to be a survivor because we use that word in very interesting and different ways. The idea of being a survivor can become central to somebody’s identity. The book talks about how there are different types of survival. There’s another character in the book, Taylor, who has gone through something and made it central to who she is, to her personal brand. There’s a whole category of influencer who centers whatever trauma it is that they’ve been through and ends up constructing an identity around the trauma itself; you have this wound at your center that never heals. That’s one version of this. 

But the other kind of survival – the one that Emma represents – is the one where you retreat from what’s happened to you–or possibly what you’ve done in order to avoid dealing with it. Emma understands that if she’s going to survive, she can’t really trust herself. She needs to give the reins to somebody else. She ends up in this relationship that to the outside observer might look like a prison, but to her, it’s like a sanctuary. It’s all a matter of perspective.

What is it about the thriller genre that has kept your interest as a writer?

I love puzzles. Writing a book like this is like building a puzzle box with something exciting and horrible at its center, but where the process of getting to the center has to be interesting in and of itself. I like that from a craft perspective. 

I have always been drawn to horror and thriller movies. I’ve started to internalize a lot of that visual language. I think I watched “Diabolique” about a million times in preparation for writing this, partly because I wanted to model the plot beats on that movie, but also because I wanted to remind myself of how horrible it can be. A dead body is horrible. A missing dead body is unspeakably more horrible, more frightening.

This novel rides on an untrustworthy speaker. Sometimes that’s Emma, but sometimes it’s the writer breaking the fourth wall. Was that something you thought of while structuring the novel, or did it happen intuitively? 

My friend Tara Isabella Burton wrote “Social Creature.” In the course of the writing, she slips into second person and addresses the reader periodically. I loved that, because it made me feel like I was complicit in what was happening on the page. The thing about survival or wilderness stories, especially when you have a lot of action, it can become kind of 30,000-foot, voyeuristic. You know you’re looking down, but you don’t feel like you’re in it. I wanted people to feel like they were on the trail, like they could imagine themselves in this moment.

Your novel is interested in this word, “survivor,” and in our ways of using it as an identifier in a modern context. What do you make of that in the psyche of our culture?

I value my work as a journalist and as a novelist in tandem, because I often feel like I’m approaching the same questions from different angles, and the two modes of writing end up in conversation. I was writing this book in a post-#MeToo context, thinking, “Where did this movement begin? What did it tell us about how women are in the world and how sexuality looms over our lives? How did some women find empowerment in this? How did some find satisfaction? How did some find a tool that they could use? Or maybe a tool that they could abuse?” 

We think of sex in terms of being a weapon. If you’re talking about sexual violence, you think of that as a man’s weapon. But if we’re talking about it as a weapon of manipulation, it becomes a woman’s weapon. I was interested in how much this wove itself into the narrative. I’ve been interested in seduction and the taboo that’s come up around the idea of seduction. It’s not something we like to acknowledge as a reality anymore, but it’s still a thing that we can do to each other. As a journalist I write a lot about sex, dating, who we are to each other and how we treat each other. And how we hurt each other often without trying to.

Lisa Hiton is a writer living in Brooklyn, N.Y. She is the author of the poetry collection “Afterfeast,” and her work has been featured or is forthcoming in the Kenyon Review, The Slowdown, NPR, New South and elsewhere.