Although never making the transition into horror or the fantastical, the uncanniness and uncomfortableness of the story play an essential role in its impact. The story uses the grim and unusual image of a woman carrying her mother’s corpse in the back of her campervan to explore the sense of alienation that comes with knowledge of mortality, that we are all growing apart from the people closest to us that we thought we knew. The collection opens with the harrowing ‘Strangers’, in which the protagonist takes a final journey with her dead mother to visit the people in her life before her body is buried. These are stories that are haunted by the gothic and the speculative, with themes like mortality and our relationship with the nonhuman world recurring throughout. The fourteen stories collected here defy easy categorisation, but each one is a sharp meditation on interpersonal relations and the vast impersonal forces that act on them. Animals At Night (2022), Booth’s first short story collection, demonstrates her mastery of short fiction that crosses the genre/literary divide. Naomi Booth’s debut novel Sealed (2017) was a thought-provoking and disturbing near-future climate disaster novel, and established her as an exciting writer who is able to tackle both speculative ideas and well-developed character meditations. “They’re getting drunk and reminiscing about their old lives, about gigs and parties and festivals on faraway beaches where they’d danced and played like animals at night, nocturnal and wild.”
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