Night of the Animals: A Novel by Bill Broun | eBook

In this imaginative debut, the tale of Noah’s Ark is brilliantly recast as a story of fate and family, set in a near-future London.

Over the course of a single night in 2052, a homeless man named Cuthbert Handley sets out on an astonishing quest: to release the animals of the London Zoo. When he was a young boy, Cuthbert’s grandmother had told him he inherited a magical ability to communicate with the animal world—a gift she called the Wonderments. Ever since his older brother’s death in childhood, Cuthbert has heard voices. These maddening whispers must be the Wonderments, he believes, and recently they have promised to reunite him with his lost brother and bring about the coming of a Lord of Animals . . . if he fulfills this curious request.

Cuthbert flickers in and out of awareness throughout his desperate pursuit. But his grand plan is not the only thing that threatens to disturb the collective unease of the city. Around him is greater turmoil, as the rest of the world anxiously anticipates the rise of a suicide cult set on destroying the world’s animals along with themselves.

Meanwhile, Cuthbert doggedly roams the zoo, cutting open the enclosures, while pressing the animals for information about his brother. Just as this unlikely yet loveable hero begins to release the animals, the cult’s members flood the city’s streets. Has Cuthbert succeeded in harnessing the power of the Wonderments, or has he only added to the chaos—and sealed these innocent animals’ fates?

Night of the Animals is an enchanting and inventive tale that explores the boundaries of reality, the ghosts of love and trauma, and the power of redemption.

The New York Times Book Review - Katy Waldman

Broun packs his novel with futuristic invention, Chablis-dry humor and a thick, dreamy nostalgia for the midsummer mayhem of Puck and his retinue—that old, good Britain. But his city is not so lost and alien that we don't feel for its (canine and human) underdogs. Broun has built, instead, the very mystery Cuthbert yearns for, a story as wildly moving and singular as an animal's eyes in the dark.

Publishers Weekly

★ 05/23/2016
Broun’s debut novel mixes mystical and maniacal forces in a swirl of futuristic imagery featuring talking animals. In 2052, the last great repository of animals on Earth is the London Zoo. The Heaven’s Gate suicide cult has been systematically exterminating wildlife, along with themselves, in a search for a higher plane of existence. At the same time, nonagenarian Cuthbert Handley, addicted to a hallucinogen called Flot, searches for Drystan, his lost brother. With the comet Urga-Rampos in the sky, Cuthbert hears the voices of animals as his search leads him to the zoo, where an all-consuming desire to free the talkative creatures seizes him. Surrounding Cuthbert is a Britain under the totalitarian regime of Henry IX, or Henry9 as he is known on WikiNous, the heavily regulated network that has replaced the Internet. As Cuthbert works his way through the zoo, snapping chain-links with bolt cutters, he converses with the jackals, penguins, and an articulate sand cat as he looks for his brother and an elusive otter prince. Through precise and eloquent prose and a hint of political satire, Broun creates a near future filled with bioelectric technology and characters with patois as diverse as their desires. Broun’s novel is strange, witty, and engrossing, skipping through madness and into the realm of myth. (July)

Jess Row

Bill Broun’s Night of the Animals is troubling in all the right ways: a vividly imagined dystopia and an ecological parable that seems all too possible and all too real. It’s compulsively readable-a novel that earns your close attention, from beginning to end.

The New York Times Book Review

A wonderful doorstop of a book…Broun packs his novel with futuristic invention, Chablis-dry humor and a thick, dreamy nostalgia…a story as wildly moving and singular as an animal’s eyes in the dark.

New York Times

A story as wildly moving and singular as an animal’s eyes in the dark.

Vox.com

Part of the pleasure of this book comes from its tricky, ever-changing structure...Night of the Animals is elegiac and lyrical, but that doesn’t mean it can’t have a hell of a lot of fun going wild at the same time.

Alexandra Kleeman

In vivid prose that breathes and trembles like a living thing, Bill Broun brings into being a future that is just fantastical enough to tell the truth. Night of the Animals will captivate you, surprise you, and remind you of the strange, precarious thing it is to be human.

Mary Gaitskill

Night of The Animals is the most beautiful, strange new novel I have read in years, and its obese, mentally ill, elderly protagonist is among the most engaging of heroes. The existence of this book in the present moment is a wonderment.

Jim Crace

[A] dark and magical futuristic rendering of the story of the Ark... with a glittering varnish of myth and invention. The result is a novel of startling originality; it is important, mesmerizing and touching.

The Hoya (Georgetown University)

Floating aimlessly, in and out of Cuthbert’s questionable rationale and disengaged touch with reality, Broun follows the adventures of one man who is both tormented and encouraged by ghosts of his past, and of a mysterious ideology surrounding the spirit of the imprisoned animals that seeks to be free.

Booklist (starred review)

Imaginative, fast-paced, thoughtful, and awash in laser-like imagery, debut novelist Broun’s phantasmagorical fable vibrantly blends myth and satire to paint both a cautionary warning about present behavior and a futuristic vision of what the unbridled abuse of nature might unveil.

Masculine Times

It’s an Orwellian, mystical affair with a peppering of environmental morality, but more than anything it’s a wild, weird ride.

Huffington Post

In prose that employs a variety of British dialects, Broun composes a story that’s engaging not only for its strange plot, but for its inventive use of language, too.

Five Books You Should Read in July Omaha.com

A sci-fi fantasy in which the tale of Noah’s Ark is recast in modern-day London.

Wall Street Journal

Night of the Animals is by turns visionary, ironic, satirical and deeply remorseful. The felled woodlands, the erased species, a new Great Extinction—all happen within one long lifetime. It’s a rich addition to the literature of lament, viewed with sympathy and longing.

Houston Chronicle

[T]his story…lingers long after the final page.

New York magazine

[A] wildly imagined futuristic dystopia (or is it?)

Chicago Tribune

Heartfelt and original.

Washington Post

Smartly written.

Library Journal

★ 06/01/2016
Broun's debut is a fascinating work set in a detailed dystopian future. Multiple footnotes help readers decipher the obscure dialect of main character Cuthbert, an extremely aged indigent man who would be dead without modern medical advances. He is also an insane drug addict bent on setting the animals free from the London Zoo. This Britain of the future is ruled by a despotic king, Harry9, intent on maintaining control and resisting the resurgence of an American cult, Heaven's Gate, which is encouraging mass suicide. In this world where the powerless can be indiscriminately killed or institutionalized, Cuthbert has so far been protected by his physician, Dr. Bajwa. The novel slowly advances our understanding of Cuthbert, Dr. Bajwa, and a bizarre but familiar setting. The story then switches viewpoints to Astrid, a female police officer responding to Cuthbert's liberation of the animals at the zoo. There follows a surprising conclusion where unlikely allies confront the forces of Heaven's Gate. VERDICT This highly recommended, original tour de force creates a richly imagined realm that evokes Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale and the Terry Gilliam movie Brazil while maintaining a sense of wonder.—Henry Bankhead, San Rafael P.L., CA

Kirkus Reviews

★ 2016-04-13
An Orwellian debut explodes ancient lore and contemporary technology to create a prescient, terrifying dystopia. In 2052, Britain has become an extreme surveillance state with pre-Victorian levels of brutal poverty. King Henry IX, aka Harry9, controls the news through WikiNous, the Internet transmitted through flesh. Alerts, text messages, and spam scroll across citizens' corneas, with incoming messages flashing colors like a migraine aura. The ability to opt out of the spam is only available to the wealthiest. Meanwhile, with the impending arrival of the comet Urga-Rampos, Heaven's Gate, a California-based cult run by Marshall Applewhite III, is trying to kill all of the world's animals and perform mass suicides, an increasingly appealing prospect for the large Indigent class. Homeless 90-year-old Cuthbert Handley sets out to free the animals of the London Zoo. Suffering from an addiction to Flôt, a legal hallucinogenic with crippling withdrawal symptoms, Cuthbert believes the animals are talking to him and hopes they will help him find his brother Drystan, who drowned in 1968 and who may or may not be the Christ of the Otters. Dr. Bajwa, Cuthbert's physician, worries Cuthbert's delusions will get him locked away in a Calm House with a Nexar hood that would "smooth and desplinter brain activity like a kind of mental woodplane." Conveniently, Dr. Bajwa is an amateur solarcopter pilot. This plot device is the one creak in an otherwise highly immersive narrative. The language of the novel crackles with energy, nimbly drawing on Old English, regional dialects and slang, and speculative future language. The worlds' religions—paganism, Christianity, Sikhism, Judaism, Islam, Yoruba—fuse together in a luminous supernatural force which buoys forward poor Cuthbert, who, despite the risk of multiple-organ failure, doggedly pursues his mission to keep the voices of the animals alive. An impressive, richly imagined, deeply urgent story.

Night of the Animals: A Novel

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