Her Body Among Animals by Paola Ferrante

Reviewed by Emily Weedon

It’s hard for me to do Her Body Among Animals justice and not fall into fan-girldom. As I read, I found myself wishing I might have run into Ferrante when I was a kid, somewhere between Dewey Decimals 398.45 (vampires) and 598.2 (birds) in a library of the imagination… Isn’t that what our favourite books do? Introduce us to thought friends we imagine we would have had, across time and space and creed. Like-minds, up late at night, pondering the irregularities, the injustices, the freakiness and the wonder of the world we live in?

Where to begin? There’s the story, Cobwebs, about the woman who is an artist but is revealing that she is becoming a spider, and who obviously, painfully wants her partner to just get her innate spiderness and to love her for it, not despite it. There’s the one with the woman trying for a baby while her boyfriend foists sex on the robot they created together, before trying for the baby. The robot, thank god, has some ideas of her own. The Silent Grave of Birds is a Canadian answer to Stephen King’s Stand By Me which unfurls with meta-horror legs and a MeToo take that liberally bastes readers in pop culture horror references… yes, dear Don Mancini, father of creepy dolls and genius of queer horror, the story about the shifting night-time cabal of creepy dolls and dead birds explicitly does mention Chucky.

The boys in this story, with their spliffs and dime bags and stolen taquitos speak an urban Toronto patois. Ferrante is chillingly good at believable boy talk. I imagine the author hiding behind a boxwood shrub outside the 7-11 on Dundas street, with a clipboard and a pencil, at 3 in the morning, taking field notes like a modern day Jane Goodall, while would be taquito thieves roll by on their skateboards.

There are signature ingredients to a Ferrante story, women and their interests and their loves (often in THAT order); a connection to the natural world, frequently avian or insectoid. Albatrosses, Corvids, Killdeer, Moorland Hawkers… those strange creatures who are hunters and relatives of dinosaurs, and yet the emblem for our souls and connection with spirit weave through the pages. There is frequent reference to the end times of this Anthropocene. There are quotidian ghosts as well as metaphorical ones: the stories are haunted by jelly-fish mimicking trash bags, and murderous chip bags - the ordinary instruments of destruction we all wield - I am reminded of every horrifying trip to the grocery store where the conveyor belt inexorably trundles items wrapped in plastic into my cart, through my hands, adding permanently to my sins and our collective demise. Ferrante handles such glimpses of doom and destruction in a cool, matter of fact way. Yes, of course we are all horrified. Of course we are all screaming inside like Munch’s famous painting while also trying to live our lives…

So often in a Ferrante story the voice or tense feels like a conditional one. In fact, the definition for the Past Perfect “An unreal past condition and its probable result in the present” sounds rather like a possible Ferrante plot which is conditional not just in its verbiage but in its grammatical DNA. This is spec writing of a whole different phylum. I feel held at an extremely precise scientific arm’s length from Ferrante’s stories by her design, given the thrills of hauntings and body horrors, but from a safe watching distance where we can both put on our lab coats, and welder’s glasses and blast furnace gloves. And then, in a flutter of crows feathers, Ferrante will disappear back into the lab to dredge up some new Shelley-esque creature of copper and bird bones who rattles around, haunted by searing moments of realization.

Ferrante is at the top of her own form in stories like When Foxes Die Electric - the thinking for herself robot - who made me thing of all the hapless Real Dolls deployed out there in the world to uncertain fates (no judging if someone owns but, but, honestly people, ick!)- When Foxes Die Electric is a classic Frankenstein type story where the would be creator’s hand is most definitely bitten by the would be/should be synthetic recipient of life. Robots in fiction almost always show us where our own humanity has failed, and Ferrante’s work here stands up to Asimov.

Sometimes Her Body Among Animals has a puckish revenge quality - she is the avenging force that makes that no-goodnikboyfriend you used to date get his literary comeuppance. In Finding Houdini a trusting woman is misled, and a snake is an instrument of justice, in a tidy and very satisfying turn on those events that have maligned women since that first garden and first snake.

In Everyday Horror Show, Ferrante uses horror as hyperbole to get to the heart of how bad the early days of parenting a tiny helpless child can be. And how overwhelming and omnipotent those creatures with their needs are. Of course it’s all wonderful according to Johnson & Johnson and everyone completely and instantly falls madly in love with their tiny infant jailers… Except if we are honest, and Ferrante is honest - we don’t. Her fiercely drawn story, told as though with a black scratchy piece of charcoal, through supernatural realism rings more true than a recitation of actual events.

Ok. I think I failed. Looks like I am starting a Ferrante Fan Girl Club. Won’t you join me?

• Finalist for the 2024 Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction

• Runner-Up for the 2023 Danuta Gleed Literary Award

• Silver Winner of the 2023 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award for Short Stories

• Finalist for the 2023 Shirley Jackson Awards

• Finalist for the 2023 Big Other Book Award for Fiction

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About the Author

Paola Ferrante is a writer living with depression. Her debut poetry collection, What to Wear When Surviving a Lion Attack (2019), was shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award. She has won Grain Magazine’s Short Grain Contest for Poetry, The New Quarterly’s Peter Hinchcliffe Short Fiction Award, Room Magazine’s Fiction Contest, and was longlisted for the 2020 Journey Prize for the story “When Foxes Die Electric.” Her work appears in After Realism: 24 Stories for the 21st Century (2022), Best Canadian Poetry 2021 (2021), North American Review, PRISM International, and elsewhere. She was born, and still resides in, Toronto.

About the Reviewer

Emily Weedon is a CSA award-winning screenwriter and author of the dystopian debut Autokrator, with Cormorant Books. Her forthcoming novel Hemo Sapiens will be published in September 2025, with Dundurn Press. https://emilyweedon.com/

Book Details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Book*hug Press (Sept. 12 2023)

• Language ‏ : ‎ English

• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 264 pages

• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1771668385

• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1771668385