Publishers Weekly
09/21/2020
Vadnais’s exciting debut immerses the reader into the dreamy and menacing near-future world of Shivering Heights, a flooded wilderness in the twilight of the human race. A biologist, Laura , studies the deaths of animals living along a polluted river and becomes obsessed with the new forms of life she encounters. In these scenes, Vadnais offers the reader dazzling glimpses of newly evolved, semihuman and hybrid species, the result of a pervasive parasite that’s slowly infecting all forms of life, forcing them to either evolve or die. The postapocalyptic tableaux include a flooded spa town haunted by an impish siren and a floating town “cobbled together from old barges and sailboats” whose inhabitants have forgotten life on dry land. As the Earth becomes more and more uninhabitable, the surviving humans, if they can still be called human, grow new appendages, scales, and feathers, and some morph into other creatures including a shark and a polar bear. The sumptuous imagery and limpid atmosphere forms a dizzying picture of a world after human existence. This dark, sensual novel invites the reader to imagine nature thriving in the toxic aftermath of human domination, and makes for an essential addition to the recent crop of eco-fiction. (Sept.)
From the Publisher
"If you’ve ever felt hemmed in by the nature around you, whether lost in a thicket of trees, a solitary figure on a beach against the vast ocean, or feeling through a haze of fog, these interconnected stories of climate takeover will intrigue you. In Fauna, Vadnais takes the lush beauty and the terrifying expansiveness of nature’s power, paired with the unknowability and potentiality of climate change and melds them in these short stories. Perfect for fans of the Southern Reach trilogy, looking for more weird, lush, climate fiction." – Mikey LaFave, Avid Bookshop
"... a lush, haunting book of climate fiction ... Vadnais’s prose is unsettling, imbued with a weighty, wet sensuality and an encroachment of life that is both frightening and strangely seductive in a Kafka-esque world of dread and bodily transformation. Survival and contagion swirl around each other in deadly battle as Vadnais’s characters rebel, fight, or give into the bitter, primitive hunger that threatens to swallow their world whole." –Booklist, starred review, Leah von Essen
“A spirited vision of the end times that reminds us that a new one will be born out of the old, as savage and alive as the previous one’s primitive beginnings.” –La Presse
“Reminiscent of Ovid, Kafka, and Wells ... [Fauna] depicts the hypnotic Darwinian nightmare our negligence and denial will lead us to in the coming years.” –Le Devoir
“Vadnais’s language is precise, rich in imagery, unsettling. The quality of the writing makes for a raw, searing read.” –L’Express
"With a devotion to language, to rhythm, to imagery (beautifully translated by Pablo Strauss) Vadnais injects a mythical, even scriptural quality to the stark realities of global warming." –Locus Magazine
"The central question of the book is whether or not it is time for humanity to get back to wilder times, and Vadnais rightly leaves the answer to that important question up to the reader." –Understory Magazine
