About two months ago, my 6-year-old daughter asked me, “Dad, if you could have any superpower in the whole world, which would it be?” The ability to fly immediately popped up and why wouldn’t it? It would be sublime. But after some consideration, I answered, “I’d like to have the ability to talk to animals.” She asked why, and I told her I want to know how they feel and what they think about everything. It’s become a recurring topic of conversation between us since.
Animals play an integral role in my novel Habitat. The book is made up of nine linked narratives and the closest thing to a recurring character throughout is the clones of a celebrity dog that stars on a science fiction television show, and the descendants of those clones a century later. I was listening to a Neil Young song, “Like an Inca,” around the time the book began gelling together. The beginning of the song sat with me while I finished writing the book and it serves as the epigraph. It involves two animals from different species discussing the downfall of a human civilization. The lyric helped me perceive animals as not only the victims of humanity in the world of Habitat, but also our observers, those historians who survive us, forever watching us rise and fall, again and again.
This is a list of books that engage with animals in different ways, probing their behaviors and our relationship to them, our sympathies for and atrocities against them. These books attempt to think about animals as they naturally exist and encounter the world. And, if the first selection on the list stands out, know that I chose it for personal and autobiographical reasons—it was an early and confusing reading experience. Who knows, it may have even jumpstarted my interest in the portrayal of animals in fiction.
Jaws by Peter Benchley
I read this book nearly forty years ago, when I was too young to be reading it. I was at an age when any novelization of a film or franchise that I loved was paper gold, a glorious reincarnation of the movie. While a shark does play a large role, the novel spends more time with the non-shark hunting lives of its characters, exploring their alcoholism and extramarital affairs. The mayor in both the film and the novel is hellbent on keeping the beaches open for the summer surge. However, in the novel, he’s being pressured by the mafia, who have invested heavily in the Amity Island beach community. This may have been the first reading experience in which I felt like the book “isn’t really about” the shark, a childhood realization that, in retrospect, prepared me for novels like Moby Dick. Still, at the time, Jaws bewildered me.
“A Full-Service Shelter” from Sing to It by Amy Hempel
An epigraph precedes this short story (originally published in Recommended Reading!)…
“They knew me as the one who shot reeking crap out of cages with a hose.”
-Leonard Michaels, “In the Fifties”
And then the first line: “They knew me as the one who shot reeking crap out of cages with a hose—and liked it.” This beginning puts the reader into the perspective of an animal-loving narrator and sets up a story that focuses on the feelings, the fears, and the allegiances of the dogs in this high-kill shelter. Each paragraph begins with either “They knew us as…” or “They knew me as…” The result is ten heart-breaking and heart-warming pages for anyone who’s ever cared about a dog, or any animal for that matter. It chronicles the ups and downs of caged dogs who are likely to be euthanized. It’s a story that speaks for them, loves them, and expresses profound confusion in the face of a world that allows them to be killed. I often revisit this collection when I need some help jumpstarting a day of my own writing.
The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham
I’ve never encountered a book by Stephen Graham Jones I didn’t like. Every book is a new departure in horror writing, exploring subgenres, and experimenting with plot and structures. The Only Good Indians is broken up into three sections and centers around an incident from ten years earlier when four friends, all adolescent boys, illegally ambushed and shot a herd of elk, including a pregnant mother elk. Ten years later, tragedies start befalling the grown men and those close to them. At the same time, they begin to have visions of a vengeful elk. Throughout the novel, Jones weaves in Blackfeet culture and questions about violence against women and the natural world. The Only Good Indians can be read, from a human perspective, as a horror novel, but through an elk’s eyes it might be read as an action revenge story about a magical elk spirit with “a very particular set of skills.”
Vasko Popa—Selected Poems: Homage to the Lame Wolf by Vasko Popa, translated by Charles Simic
Vasko Popa (1922-1991) was a Serbian poet who incorporated surrealism and Serbian folklore into his modernist style, exploring the significance of the wolf and the relationship between the Serbian orthodox church and earlier folkloric beliefs and traditions.
This collection, which I adore, is broken up into eleven parts, featuring several series of poems that touch upon the figure of the wolf. St. Sava, the founder of the Serbian orthodox church, is shown both reconstituting the wolf in service of his religion and being himself transformed by the symbol of the wolf.
In one series of poems, “Wolf’s Earth,” a father and son debate whether the wolf that they witness intertwined with the Earth is attempting to devour the Earth or protect and admire her: “Does he have a sweet tooth/For her bitter flesh/Or is he just praying to her beauty.”
The figure of the wolf in these poems is beyond our control or understanding—a symbol of a past that cannot be rewritten or forgotten despite the many ways it must contend with the present.
Raccoon by Daniel Heath Justice
A few years ago, I wouldn’t have thought I needed a study devoted to the raccoon, but after reading Justice’s book, I came to understand the impactful role the animal has played in our planet’s global and cultural history. It’s part of Reaktion Books’ Animal series, which has published over a hundred such books about the natural and cultural history of different animal species. Raccoon is an incredible examination of the animal that delves into its natural history, symbolism and cultural origins, appropriation to perpetuate racial stereotypes and hatred, and myriad other ways it has impacted the human world.
One of the many illuminating takeaways about the raccoon is its resilience and adaptability. The raccoon of today lives in a world that, if we were in its paws, would be in a post-apocalyptic landscape. Its natural habitat has been largely destroyed by the bottomless expansionism of human civilization. And despite this, the raccoon has adapted and learned to survive. With powerful physical dexterity, an omnivorous appetite, and an evolving intelligence, raccoons have an innate ability to create new and thriving homes in the wake of loss and exile. We could learn a lot from them because, as Justice considers in his epilogue, the future may be raccoon.
The Bees by Laline Paull
The Bees immerses the reader in the dystopian tale of an authoritarian regime in transition. The protagonist is a bee named Flora 717 and the story is set almost exclusively inside of a single beehive, which imposes a strict hierarchy on its members. Bees of the upper castes are named after specific plants, but those born of a lower caste are all named Flora. Most Floras are relegated to sanitation for their entire lives, removing waste and dead bees for the hive. But Flora 717 is assigned to different jobs throughout the novel: working in the nursery for the Sage (a group of priestesses), a stint in sanitation, and then making her way to foraging. These reassignments allow the reader to explore both the physical spaces of the hive as well as the architecture and motivations of the different castes, uncovering the ruthless political agendas ever-present in a hive whose Queen is ailing. The more we see of the hive and its bees, the more the novel reveals itself to be as a much a story about the real lives of bees as it is a metaphor for the fascist machinations of human power struggles. A political thriller in a beehive, a compelling protagonist, and an author whose extensive research seamlessly holds together all its parts—I couldn’t put it down.
An Immense World by Ed Yong
Of all the books on this list, Ed Yong’s exploration of animals’ senses brings me closest to the experience of communicating with them. Yong begins by imagining a human joining an elephant, mouse, robin, owl, bat, rattlesnake, spider, and mosquito in a room, and then describes the sensory experience of each animal. While all occupy the same space, their individual experiences highlight the different ways in which they sense an environment and alter our understanding of how they might feel.
An important distinction Yong makes concerning what we understand and don’t understand about animals’ behavior and senses is that while we may be able to discover, biologically, how an animal “reacts to what it senses,” we don’t know “how it feels.” In the chapter on “Pain,” Yong writes: “Imagine your entire body became delicate to the touch whenever you stubbed your toe: That’s a squid’s reality.”
For anyone seeking a better understanding of how animals experience the world—not how we experience animals in a vast network of ecologies making up a world that we think belongs to us but how they might feel—I can’t recommend An Immense World enough. It’s a wondrous journey.