In her collection of short stories, The Life of a Creature, Nadja Lubiw-Hazard showcases the depths of hope, love, and tragedy. The parallels these stories draw between human and animal experience expose the line between the two as artificial and insignificant. While exploring the meaning of humanity, each story engages with an animal encounter that reverberates outward providing, solace, challenge, comfort, and horror.
The writing of these stories is utterly exquisite, however, the trigger warnings for animal abuse are not to be taken lightly. The author has experience in veterinary medicine, and the descriptions of animal suffering ring with authenticity and detail. Though some of the stories are, at their core, hopeful in nature, the book pulls no punches, traveling to the darkest corners or despair, loss, grief, and abuse that in some cases is undeniably horrific.
Lyrical and deeply centered in her characters’ trauma, The Life of a Creature, proves again and again that our encounters with animals shape us in lasting ways. The prose is beautiful, and the stories full of power, but for an animal lover, this is not an easy read.
The collection itself is well curated, with a handful of stories featuring the same protagonist sprinkled as a throughline between the others. The violence, for the most part, is justified by the story’s purpose. Only one, in my opinion, felt a tad gratuitous. Overall, there is a drive behind these works that carries the reader safely through the dark corners, not unscathed and much changed, but with a renewed understanding of just how important sharing our lives with animals can be.
And despite our determination to separate ourselves from the label, there is a strong sense that we are as much a “creature” as any of our animal brethren.
Frances Pauli writes animal fiction and speculative stories. She is the author of the Serpentia series, the Imbrium novellas, and the award-winning Earth Tigers books. Frances is a voracious reader of animal fiction, and an advocate for books of all types which illuminate the animals’ perspective.