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Amie Souza Reilly bought an old house in the suburbs. She had just gotten remarried and was looking forward to a new start with her new husband and her six-year-old son. But immediately after moving in, the two brothers who lived next door began an insidious crusade to push them out. They followed her, peered in her windows, stood in her yard, trapped her inside her car. As they broke boundary after suburban boundary, she found herself implicated in their violence.
Human/Animal merges personal narrative and cultural criticism to unleash the complicated relationship between instinct and action, violence and regret. This bestiary-in-essays wrestles with American colonialism, horror films, feminism, and gender studies to confront the intrusive neighbors the author could not. Ultimately, this book asks larger questions about civility, care, and the line between human and animal.
Illustrated with the author’s own sketches, Human/Animal grapples not only with Reilly’s place in her neighborhood, but with America’s past and current political climate.
“There are so many ways to write about violence.' What and where are our edges, these lyric essays ask, and what will we do, when pushed, to protect them?" — Irene Cooper, Los Angeles Review
"Reilly's curiosity as a writer makes Human/Animal into a transfixing horror story, especially as nonfiction. I recommend her book to anyone who feels stumped at how to live alongside our wolves and remain deeply human." — Motif
"Reilly’s work is an ambitious undertaking and begs to be approached slowly, almost as though you should hold out your hand and let it sniff you before you attempt to rub its ears." —The Christian Century
"Reilly comments on the nature of proximity and familiarity, asking questions about surveillance, dominance, space, and boundaries. She cleverly weaves parallels between the animal world and the ways human society has both integrated and weaponized animal behaviors as tools to establish power over women and minorities. Readers of experimental essays, memoir, personal essays, and hybrid forms of nonfiction will delight in the formal distinctiveness of Human/Animal." — Kristine Langley Mahler. author of Curing Season
"Reilly’s situation becomes a microcosm for a much larger pattern of ills within our society. .... In the end, the particular wrongs of the brothers matter much less than Reilly’s meticulous processing of them. Readers looking for a wide-ranging meditation on our country’s political climate and a host of other issues will find much food for thought here." — Washington Independent Review of Books
"an ambitious, braided essay collection that resists easy answers because, like walking past all the houses lined up on a suburban street, there is simply no way to articulate all of the violence that can take place there, in acts big and small, seen and unseen." — Sarah Rosenthal, Hippocampus Magazine
Table of Contents
Prologue
1. What Happened. To ape/to badger
2. On Boundaries. To bear/to pig
3. On gossip. To parrot/to slug/to swallow
4. On Performance. To cock/to clam
5. On catching and being caught. To dog/to bat/to fly/to peacock
6. On Fear. To hawk
7. On boundaries, again. To seal/to lark/to squirrel.
8. On boundaries, once more. To ram/ to chicken (out)/to fish
9. On paranoia and metaphor.
10. On continuation. To ferret/to leech
Afterword
Bestiary entries, indexed
Appendix/Notes
Bibliography