Some books start loud. This one doesn’t. It lingers. It stares. It waits for you to notice it hasn’t left the room.
Human/Animal by Amie Souza Reilly is shaped like a bestiary, but reads more like someone carving notches into a wall just to stay grounded. Each essay is built around an animal verb. To peck. To ferret. To dog. The words are careful and wild at the same time. They’re not metaphors. They’re instincts written down.
The book begins in a suburban neighborhood where Reilly and her family move in. Everything feels typical until it doesn’t. Two neighbors start watching her. Staring through windows. Parking outside for hours. Following her on foot. It’s subtle enough for everyone else to dismiss, but persistent enough to become a full-body threat. She reports it. No one listens. So she starts tracking it herself, through language, through art, through this collection.
I read it while my cat locked in on the corner of the room like she was watching something move that I couldn’t see. Felt about right. There’s no violence in these pages. Just that creeping awareness that something is off. And the sense that no one is going to help.
“I did not want to watch them anymore. I could not stop watching them.”
That line doesn’t come with drama. It just sits there. Exactly like the fear it’s describing.
The essays move quietly, but they land hard. Reilly isn’t offering analysis. She’s writing the actual emotional mechanics of being surveilled. The paranoia. The awareness. The exhaustion. The way fear gets folded into your morning routine until it’s indistinguishable from habit. She doesn’t explain it. She shows you what it feels like to live in it.
The drawings, created by Reilly herself, are part of the collapse. They’re frantic, intimate, and never decorative. It’s like she ran out of ways to say something and started sketching instead—like the body took over where language failed. The images echo the prose, but they also open space for critique. They carry the same tension threaded through the essays, speaking to power, control, and the quiet violence baked into American civility and its political design.
Reilly writes, “I am looking wherever I can for reasons.” That’s the emotional center of the book. The line doesn’t want pity. It just sits there, too. A record of trying to make sense of something senseless.
This isn’t a book that tries to tell you what to think. It doesn’t chase resolution. It doesn’t pretend anything is finished. It just tracks the shape of dread when it builds slowly, in plain sight, and no one else believes it’s there.
Some people will want a lesson. A takeaway. Something to tie it all up. This book refuses that. It’s not interested in closure. It’s interested in what happens when closure never comes.
“If it doesn’t, you might be the one outside the window. Or worse, you might be the one whispering, I did not want to watch them anymore. I could not stop watching them.”
Human/Animal is available now from Wilfrid Laurier University Press. Order it, read it, and be sure to check your window at night…