Serena Pemberton is one of the most unforgettable characters you're likely to encounter in modern fiction. Beautiful, calculating, cold and brutal, she starts out impressive and just grows in power until, by the end, she illuminates the whole book.

This is not necessarily an admirable thing.

Ron Rash's fourth novel, "Serena" (Ecco, 371 pages, $24.95), is set in North Carolina during the Great Depression. Serena is the new bride of timber baron George Pemberton, whose goal is to clear-cut a mountain range and make a fortune off the lumber before the government has time to seize the land and turn it into Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

Pemberton is ruthless, but he's a novice compared with his wife, who is like a character out of Ayn Rand. Serena can eyeball a massive old tree and calculate dead-on how many board feet it will produce; she can do this in the blink of an eye, and she can do this when an important public wager is on the line.

She dresses like a man, takes part in all of her husband's decisions ("His business is mine, just as mine is his," she says early on) and rides a white stallion through the lumber camp, the eagle she trained to eat rattlesnakes riding on her shoulder.

Before meeting Serena, Pemberton had gotten a kitchen maid pregnant, and the book opens with a scene that sets the tone for the next 350 pages: The girl's father confronts Pemberton, who doesn't just stab the man -- he disembowels him. And then Serena steps forward, picks up the knife and hands it to the girl. She advises her to sell it. "That money will help when the child is born. It's all you'll ever get from my husband and me."

Again and again, the book returns to the conflict of man against nature and the devastation that occurs when the balance is willfully upset. Without trees, the denuded mountain slopes produce deadly mud slides; without snakes, the camp is overrun with rats. The loggers and workers watch with growing unease; the devastation is monumental, catastrophic, epochal.

"You're disturbing the natural order of things is what you're doing," says Snipes, a logger who serves as a sort of Greek chorus. And, later, "That eagle has done upset what the Orientals call the yen and the yang. ... The way things is balanced."

Like the hillside without trees, Serena herself is lacking some vital yang. Pemberton still has it, some glimmer of humanity, and after the kitchen maid gives birth to his son, that glimmer begins to glow.

He watches the girl, furtively compares the toddler with pictures of himself, and Serena watches him watch. And we watch her watch, turning the pages like mad. And the whole thing sweeps to its breathtaking and inevitable conclusion.

Laurie Hertzel is the Star Tribune's books editor.