From birth, we’re surrounded by animals. We cling to stuffed animal friends, wear clothing adorned with bunnies and bears, and listen to stories of anthropomorphized creatures. The first books we encounter, too, are often tributes to animals. As a child, I devoured all the Black Stallion books, Jim Kjelgaard’s Big Red and the rest of his novels about Irish Setters, Jack London’s Call of the Wild and White Fang, and every other animal book I could find.
I’m still and forever drawn to animal stories: arrested by my neighborhood’s social media posts of bobcats caught on Ring cameras, bears raiding birdfeeders, fox mothers carrying their kits. I save newspaper articles about red-tailed hawks nesting on ledges of urban buildings, wild boars prowling the streets of Rome, coyotes crossing the frozen ponds of Central Park, and police dogs leading their handlers to fugitives.
And for me, our relationships with animals—all the ways in which we admire, fear, cherish, and exploit them—is a bottomless source for fiction. The stories in my linked collection The Animal Room delve into human-animal dynamics in all their colorful iterations, including deer hunting, private zoos, therapy animals, laboratory mice, dogs of the rescue and working variety, and maligned pests like the spotted lanternfly. Together, the stories aim to show how our attitude toward animals is largely dependent on context and species. They also try to shine a light on the part of the human mind that is bound to its own animal nature: the “animal room” hidden within each of us, a primal locus of deep-seated instincts, fears, and desires.
