Coyotes are coming: Novelist explores new threats to America's suburbs

Ever since the mid-20th century, novels, movies and TV series have explored our fascination with the secretly troubled lives of people living in the suburbs - perhaps because the majority of Americans, including in the Bay Area, live in suburbs.

In narratives from the "dark suburbia" genre, the characters want to enjoy the American dream of finally owning a nice house with a big yard in a safe, pleasant town. But they are deeply unhappy. In classics of the genre, the husbands go off to their soul-crushing corporate jobs, while their wives are stuck at home, despairing over wasted college educations and the mundane tasks of housekeeping and raising the next generation of upwardly mobile suburbanites.

With her new novel, "Coyoteland" (Flatiron Books), East Bay author Vanessa Hua brings the genre into the 2020s and into the strange, post-pandemic Bay Area we live in now. The wives are just as likely to have the soul-crushing corporate jobs, while the kids are most definitely not all right, as they deal with pressure to look a certain way, get into top colleges and not do anything on social media that will destroy their futures.

Hua's book is set in a tony, woodsy fictional East Bay suburb called El Nido, just as people are coming out of sheltering in place.

"I was writing this in the spring of 2021," Hua said. "And the world was sort of lurching in fits and starts out of the pandemic. The question remained: Are we going back to the way we were or forge something different, something better, or will it potentially go back to worse than it was. I think hinge points are really interesting times in history for novelists to explore."

In her previous two novels, 2018's "A River of Stars" and 2022's "Forbidden City," Hua illuminated the contemporary immigrant experience in San Francisco's Chinatown and a teen-age girl's survival during the Cultural Revolution, respectively. Hua found the inspiration for "Coyoteland" much closer to home. During the pandemic she was walking in her suburban neighborhood when she suddenly saw a coyote run by her, chased by two deer.

It got her thinking about our "topsy-turvy" world, with wildlife becoming so present in populated neighborhoods. It also got her pondering the idea of "territory, whether it's with actual wildlife or the ways in which people can be territorial." She said, "In that era, we were really asking ourselves, ‘how do we get along with each other, how - how do we be good neighbors to each other? Can - can we?'"

In Hua's book, as with other suburban narratives, anxiety and confusion simmer beneath glossy surfaces. Even with the pandemic easing, threats still loom in El Nido. There are distant wildfires that can turn the sky orange, rowdy Airbnb renters next door and social competition among the parents at the local swim club. Then there is the coyote, as referred to in the title. He's been pushed out of his territory by a new housing development, so he's hunting for prey in people's backyards and on school playing fields.

Hua says her cast of characters also reflect the "complicated" changing demographics in American suburbs, just after the country faced a racial reckoning with the George Floyd protests. In the Bay Area, once predominantly white suburbs, like fictional El Nido, have become increasingly diverse. Hua said she wanted to push back against the "outdated representation" of suburbs being "homogenous enclaves."

Her protagonists include Jin Chang, a laid-off software engineer who immigrated from China, his resourceful 15-year-old daughter Jane, her friend Tasha Washington, one of the few Black girls in town, and Ana Rodriguez, the Latina housekeeper of Jin's white neighbors.

The novel opens with Jin, the requisite outsider, moving his family into a fixer-upper - though they can only manage this move because Jin's investor friend back in China wants him to do some quick work on the house so they can flip it in the Bay Area's overheated real-estate market.

Jin wonders how they'll fit in; it was easier back in majority-Asian Fremont. He is both curious and wary of the white family next door, especially the wife, Blair Belle, who becomes his chief antagonist. She, her husband and three children seem to have achieved the "right" kind of prosperous American life - three cars, a Princeton-bound daughter and the ideal California backyard, with a pool, brick pizza oven, sectional sofa, "lemon tree strung with lights."

The Belles also followed the pandemic trend of installing a chicken coop, which perplexes Jin: "The stink, the noise." But it is soon revealed that the Belles' chickens and big orange cat have become targets for the coyote and the family faces other existential threats, though from within. Their Princeton-bound daughter is secretly dealing with an eating disorder, while Blair and her husband have maxed out their credit cards in an attempt to keep up with the El Nido lifestyle.

"I think there was some New York Magazine article on how people were going broke even though they were making 300K a year or 500K a year," Hua said. "I forget (the exact figures) but, the idea was, the more you make, the more you spend. I think that's just a reflection of the U.S. right now: No matter what economic class you're in, there's still a feeling of precariousness."

Indeed, that sense of financial and housing insecurity runs through most of the character's lives. In an era when the economic divide in America grows ever greater between the haves and have-nots, the characters in Hua's book are the wanna-haves. They aspire to all the opportunities they believe a suburb like El Nido can offer them and their children. Ana is willing to continue working for Blair, even if she might not get paid because gets to live in her home. This way, Ana hopes to hide from her abusive ex and give her daughter the opportunity to attend El Nido's top-ranked public schools.

Likewise, Tasha's widowed mother, Minerva Washington, is trying to figure out a way to gain a foothold in El Nido's real estate market so that her kids, too, can attend El Nido schools. But even though she's an M.D. and runs the convalescent hospital in town, she can't afford to buy even a modest home in El Nido. Her only hope is to enter a lottery to win a below-market unit at a controversial new subdivision. "Wealthy elsewhere was middle class in El Nido, and middle class might as well have been poor," Hua writes.

As the characters' interests begin to collide, tensions, subterfuge and high-tech surveillance ratchet up. Readers familiar with the dark suburbia genre or with famous Bay Area tragedies may begin to wonder if the action is headed in certain directions. Will cliquishness among among the high school girls lead to a fatal stabbing? Could the Airbnb party become the site of a mass shooting? Will a wildfire erupt and sweep down through the oaks and brush and destroy El Nido? And what is the coyote going to do?

It's safe to say that Hua takes the book in some unexpected directions that satisfies one point she hopes to make about her characters, and about people in communities like El Nido: They have more in common with each other than they think. "I hope no one comes off as a villain," Hua said. "Even though they're in conflict each other at times, they all want what they believe is best for their children and for their families, right? So they in a sense they share that."

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This story was originally published June 3, 2026 at 1:34 AM.