The Animals in That Country
A virus gives humans the ability to understand animal communication. Part road trip novel, part speculative fiction masterpiece about what we'd actually hear if animals could speak. Won multiple Australian prizes and represents the best of literary speculative fiction from outside the usual centers.
Readers who usually love unlikable women say Jean never quite earns it here, her choices and dialogue not adding up even for someone drunk and overwhelmed for most of the book. The animal-speech passages, the entire premise, wear thin for several, who admit they “found myself skimming over those passages” by the back half, dismissing the whole device as “a mishmash of ideas and story points”. The close draws the sharpest disagreement of all: one reader calls it “a completely anti-climactic ending”, and another says flatly “the ending is horrifying”. Several also lose the plot itself once symptoms escalate, saying the outbreak’s logic stops making sense and Jean’s granddaughter barely registers as a person in her own right.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
