Strange Things focuses on the imaginative mystique of the wilderness of the Canadian North, where Atwood looks at the myths and their reinventions in the work of writers such as Robert Service, Robertson Davies, Alice Munro, E. J. Pratt, Marian Engel, Margaret Laurence, and Gwendolyn MacEwan The subjects she discusses include the ‘Grey Owl Syndrome’ of white writers going native; the folklore arising from the mysterious Franklin expedition of the nineteenth century; the myth of the dreaded snow monster, the Wendigo; and the relations between nature writing and new forms of Gothic. She also looks at how a fresh generation of women writers have adapted the imagery of the Canadian North for the exploration of contemporary themes of gender, the family, and sexuality.
