Whether Brandon Taylor knows it or not, in Filthy Animals he’s provided a perfect companion piece for our nervous era of reopening. Following the success of his much-lauded debut novel, Real Life, Taylor’s first story collection presents sumptuous, melancholic portraits of characters overwhelmed ... stories that range from stellar to pretty good (I’m not sure Taylor is capable of 'bad' writing) ... Taken as a whole, the book is a study in rogue appetites, and though the connected story line holds the most gems — and benefits greatly from the same attention to structure that Taylor brought to “Real Life” — the others are not to be missed ... shines here, in the dirt ... Taylor has a talent for taking the dull hum of quotidian life and converting it into lyrics ... These intimacies, often cozy, pair splendidly with the uglier, more brutal elements to establish the book’s focus: the feral that lurks under the veneer, the unspoken impulses that can lead people to contort themselves into gruesome shapes ... These doses of ferocity add much to the experience of the tamer stories ... highlights another strength of the collection: its handling of queerness, particularly in its physical manifestations. It’s notable for an author of Taylor’s caliber to depict so unflinchingly these unsanitized queer hookups ... Appalling decisions, squirm-inducing acts of aggression and, throughout, demons lurking in the shadows: Filthy Animals makes human contact seem like a thrilling horror story. As such, it speaks to both the anxiety and allure of 'getting back out there.'
[An] impressive first collection ... Although each of the stories here can be read as a stand-alone work, over half of them are perhaps best described as chapters of a novella-length piece ... the cloistered world of student life offers Taylor the perfect canvas for the emotionally charged interplay between an insular cast. Most significantly though, these stories provide further evidence that intimacy is Taylor’s great subject ... moments of connection that pepper these stories feel so miraculous. But welcoming relief involves acknowledging the true depth of the void that’s been filled ... Taylor also dares to show us how violence can be an act of terrible intimacy.
[Taylor] is on arguably even more glistening form in his follow up ... together paint a portrait of generational estrangement in ways that, while different in almost every way, put one in mind of early Bret Easton Ellis ... Taylor is a far more careful, sensitive and probing writer than Ellis, though, and his prose quivers with an emotional hyper-vigilance that at times almost feels alive ... Self-loathing, confusion, the sheer intractable reality of the physical self that must always be negotiated: Taylor handles his theme with rare grace and compassion. Filthy Animals also feels determinedly less political than Real Life, which was pointedly a novel about race and sexuality; here the concerns of his characters, which include a young woman 'who has blown up her life' and two men hesitantly trying to establish the contours of their relationship, are less ideological than existential. Still, while this collection contains several stories with female protagonists, I’d argue Taylor is better at writing about young men, trying to find their place in a world that has such defined ideas about what men should be ... He’s also extraordinarily good on the irresolute nature of desire.
... impressive ... Taylor plays the Lionel-Charles-Sophie storyline for all its awkwardness and resentment, but it can feel like a note held too long to suspend commitment, which is the resolution we’re trained to expect ... The violence is neither glamorous nor gratuitous; it is senseless without being pointless. In contrast, Taylor presents such earnest moments of vulnerability in Anne of Cleves that my breath hitched ... Some writers have the gift of perfect pitch when writing dialogue; Taylor’s gift is perfect tempo. In a band of writers, he’d be the drummer who sticks to a steady moderato. He neither rushes a story to its high notes nor drags the pace so that we can admire his voice. And as a plotter, he doesn’t rely on gasp-inducing reveals ... Taylor’s superpower is compressing a lifetime of backstory into a paragraph – sometimes just a sentence ... I’ve come to expect, in fiction, the story of the Sad Gay Youth who is rejected by his often religious family and thereafter becomes self-destructive or reckless. And while Taylor refracts versions of this story throughout the collection, he does so without overly romanticising it ... He is a writer of enormous subtlety and of composure beyond his years.
... stunning ... What’s changed in Taylor’s work is not his subjects but his style. These 11 stories still involve life in and around academia, as Real Life did, with all its attendant types and even, at times, archetypes ... Now, however, Taylor seems to have taken the immediacy that has always marked his nonfiction writing and applied it to his imaginary characters. As individuals, they often have trouble connecting with others, but as fictional entities, they pulse and glow on the page ... these moments offer careful insight into vulnerabilities ... In the second half of Real Life, the author seemed to break through the scrim between himself and what he wanted to describe. In Filthy Animals, there is no scrim; each story has a cinematic quality that is wholly earned and not derived from thinking, as authors sometimes seem to do ... Each of Taylor’s pieces is emotionally rich but also physically grounded. His writing is fine without being enigmatic. There are dirty dishes, cruel remarks and messy orgasms, but nothing elusive or precious. Taylor, a former doctoral candidate in biochemistry who is once and ever a scientist as well as an artist, trusts facts to tether feelings ... Deep observation combined with deep compassion keeps readers focused on real lives even in the midst of chaos, rage or disaster ... allows its characters to crawl out into the open and learn to love.
Filthy Animals is unflinching in its grounded views of relationships and introspection. Taylor draws characters like he’s channeling Tom Stoppard, revealing them in their conversations, projecting them off the page like they’re standing beside you. These are not characters, they are people, whole in a way that is almost jarring ... The lead voice throughout is Lionel ... it feels like you are being born with him into some new negotiation with reality ... Taylor has crafted a raw slice of humanity that will catch you in its synaptic wordplay and release you into its emotional resonance. I promise, you will find yourself somewhere in this book. And it will make you glad to have been chosen out of the world.
The vision on display in [one] paragraph—the way it surveys genders, races, sexualities, and fashion choices in the room and haphazardly mixes and matches them—is one of Brandon Taylor’s major achievements ... There are not many writers who represent such a wide range of identities in their fiction, nor are there many who weave them together so effortlessly. But Taylor’s fiction is no multicultural paradise ... Both Real Life and Filthy Animals focus on characters who struggle to create meaningful connections amidst this array of identity ... Both books offer moments of possibility, but never any deep connections.
Taylor is uniquely adept at capturing the discomforting feeling of being out of place at a social gathering ... Perhaps it is Taylor’s scientific background that allows him to anatomize social interactions so effectively (he left a graduate program in biochemistry to pursue a writing career) ... For anyone worried that a scientific background might lend itself to a stilted, lifeless prose, I can assure you that the stories in this collection pulse with life. Neither cold nor detached, these stories are suffused with a warmth and humanity that recalled for me the uncanniness of Raymond Carver, the empathy of Alice Munro, and the meticulous irony of Chekhov ... There is indeed much of Chekhov in these stories — in their revealing details, in the way events gradually build and unspool, in the author’s close observation that plumbs the depths of human behavior ... Taylor’s gift for close, empathetic observation can be found especially in the linked stories in this collection ... as stand-alone pieces they made less of an impact on me compared to the richer, more three-dimensional portraits we get in the linked stories. Taylor is proficient at narrative compression, a skill showcased in the shorter pieces, but he shines most, I think, when given the leisure to revisit characters and their interpersonal dynamics, usually from different vantage points, to apply additional layers of perspective to relationships we thought we understood on first sight ... Events in one story have repercussions, later on in the collection, in another. The effect is a bit like watching a chain reaction occurring in slow motion. By and large, the stories in Filthy Animals are patient and quiet — until they’re not. These stories are not flashy, there are no postmodern tricks, just a masterful grasp of pacing that gradually builds tension toward an inevitable eruption ... Reading the 11 stories, I found myself thinking of the painter Paul Cézanne. I thought of the way he would approach even the simplest of still-life subjects — a bowl of apples, say — with a meticulous, almost obsessive desire to render it as faithfully as possible. Taylor’s portraits exhibit the same kind of attention to quotidian detail, the same solidity and fullness and depth. Taylor is rarely content to allow one perspective to dominate in his writing. He considers his characters from multiple viewpoints, from all angles, meticulously layering brush stroke on brush stroke, returning, like Cézanne, to the same themes, the same dynamics, the same subjects, again and again.
Taylor writes with incredible clarity and precision about the lives of people in small university towns, and how they are never as quaint or idyllic as those on the outside might imagine ... the cast of characters in the collection...are lonely, uncertain, and looking for a way out of the various cages they find themselves in. They also, at times, prove to be the predator as well as the prey. As the characters try to betray their way out of relationships, sabotage their careers, or attempt to end their lives, we are reminded that freeing oneself can often be a violent process ... Neither Real Life nor Filthy Animals could be described exactly as being Internet fiction, though each depicts a world that Black and queer online spaces could offer refuge from. His characters (especially Wallace and Lionel) are undeniably isolated, surrounded by people who make demands of them both to be things they are not and to not be things they are—and to read these people’s minds about when it’s the proper time for each. It is perhaps fitting, then, that Taylor’s writing, from his fiction to his Twitter page to his newsletter, has created precisely that space for readers now: a refuge from the beastly terrors of marginalization—an untamed, unruly, ecstatic wilderness.
Though these tales are set in the bleak environments of Midwest college campuses and dried out suburbs, the people and their situations are what bring the set pieces to gorgeous life. The folks populating Taylor's swiftly spinning universe have been created purposefully as unique and extraordinary, and this careful characterization seems to be the author's forte ... Throughout the collection, much of Taylor's imagery is exquisitely vivid ... While not all the stories in the collection are of uniform excellence, the ones that are gel into a magnificent memorable reading experience saturated with all the high drama and the low-down pettiness of relationship dynamics.
Each story is somehow both desolate and invigorating ... The power of Taylor’s finely crafted stories comes partly from how effectively they each tease and then steer away from cliche; every paragraph and scene is both familiar and, through the precision of Taylor’s language, unsettlingly strange ... Taylor is an important literary talent, not least for his ability to render the familiar into the shockingly unfamiliar. Full of beauty and harshness, the complex and startling stories of Filthy Animals will stick with readers long after the pages are read.
... painstakingly authentic. Taylor’s prose hums with energy, and the reading experience expands from a textual happening to an immersive experience ... Along with the overarching story, one rife with so much tension and discomfort it leaps from the page, you get snippets into the lives of an intriguing set of characters ... written almost in real time, taking place over hours or days and transforming the mundane aspects of life into something meaningful. Filthy Animals could read as a single story. Yet, Taylor chose not to write another novel. And that is where the magic lies in Filthy Animals.
The stories are wrought with emotion and complexity, yet at the same time, Taylor’s writing is soft, quiet, gentle. The stories feel almost like slices of life, but the every day is heightened by the intensity of the characters’ longing, desire, anger and, above all else, passion ... Taylor’s characters are beautiful messes, with their flaws, uncertainty, and mistakes making them all the more intriguing and real. With some recurring in different stories, the reader is able to understand certain relationships from different perspectives and feel even more deeply the characters’ desperate attempts to connect to one another. The book is also wonderfully queer and presents queer love and identities with all the intricacy and uniqueness they deserve.
Unfortunately, despite offering a handful of scenes that sing, much of the collection languishes, too often missing the mark on the balance between subtlety and earnestness ... Occasionally, Taylor seems to seek an impact with this abruptness, only to shy away from it in other stories ... Taylor is a writer that wears his heart on his sleeve—for better or for worse—but at times seems to get lost between genuine vulnerability and nuance. Exposition is heavily featured, as characters are as likely to relay their trauma than detail the ways it affects them. In other instances, he seems to pull his punches rather than lay them bare. Multiple stories hinge on moments of intimacy or violence, but these are as likely to take place off the page as they are to take place on it ... When Taylor’s at his best, the work soars. Several stories contain a beautiful aside or two that deepens the narrative. And when everything comes together, the result is remarkable ... There’s a few groan-inducing lines, and all too often the narrative is wielded more like a hammer than a scalpel. But when everything falls in order, the effect is breathtaking. There is a distinct talent on display in Filthy Animals; I only wish Taylor trusted himself and his readers more to know the delicateness of the dance is what keeps us coming back for more.
This sensation, more than any overarching social structure or political configuration, is Taylor’s central subject—the way in which, in our intensely mediated era, other people’s expectations and preconceptions wind their way into our consciousness, disfiguring our encounter with our own subjectivity ... it reads like a landmark of millennial fiction, revealing an even clearer picture of the expansiveness of Taylor’s vision than his rigorously structured debut ... My favorite story, 'Anne of Cleves,' centers on a couple, Sigrid and Marta, portraying the quicksilver alterations in their dynamic over a year’s time as Marta settles into the first lesbian relationship of her life. In its sparse sweep and discordant, transfixing moments of grace, it’s reminiscent of the best stories of Joy Williams ... Taylor’s plots are difficult to describe in concrete terms. They tend to be almost antidramatic in their structure—frequently, the climactic moment arrives when a character resolves not to take a significant action or respond to a triggering event in a preconditioned way ... Taylor is never deterministic, and his stories refuse to contrive epiphanies or moments of revelation that explain away the uncertainty ... Taylor shares the existentialist’s habitus of lapsed faith—he was raised in a strict, religious household—and radical skepticism toward received wisdom and groupthink. Ultimately, however, I think it’s futile to look to the past to interpret his work. To describe what exactly Taylor is up to, we’ll be needing new terms.
In Brandon Taylor’s short story collection, sexual tension acts more like an undertow, lurking to pull its victims down below ... As difficult as the subject matter may be to stomach at times, Filthy Animals is full of beautiful writing. However, since some stories feature the same characters and others do not, the reading experience lacks cohesion ... Nevertheless, the characters in Filthy Animals are relatable in ways we may not want to admit to ourselves, especially regarding unmet desire ... Fans of Taylor’s work will be fascinated by Filthy Animals, but newcomers should be aware that it’s an intense read.
...promise[s] all the perks of great literature - drama, atmosphere, indelible characters - but little else in the way of comfort ... Through it all, Taylor returns again and again to the love triangle between a suicidal math major and two tempestuous dancers, a tangled pas de trois of race, identity, and perception ... B+
The seemingly civilised setting of a midwestern college town allows Taylor to illuminate internal states of unrest ... Redolent of the work of Garth Greenwell and Bryan Washington, Taylor is also a master craftsman of sex scenes, with all of their attendant awkwardness. He deftly explores those strange bedfellows of tenderness and violence and the ever-changing geometries between people ... The stories in Filthy Animals, some of which have appeared in publications including American Short Fiction and Guernica, are more tautly composed than Real Life, which was written in a five-week sprint ... Taylor’s characters are sincere without being sentimental – their pain too palpable to perform the cool detachment in vogue among his cohort. The agency he affords them provides dramatic tension and is a refreshing counterpoint to the passive ennui increasingly prevalent in contemporary fiction.
Taylor lets his characters live in their physical, animal bodies. Characters are extra-aware of their hungers. More than one story has a character growling. Taylor doesn’t just keep the joys and upsets of life in his characters’ mind, either. He shows the pleasures these characters experience through their bodies, like in eating and sex. Likewise, characters’ have both emotional and physical frustrations, through illness and pain ... The nastiness inflicted on some of these characters are so palpable that at times I found myself physically cringing ... Taylor effectively explores how people can suffer under racism, sexism, classism, and, most prevalently in the collection, homophobia, but the stories aren’t heavy-handed rallying cries against bigotry. They are nuanced, and there are the unmistakable effects of prejudice, but moreso the collection is about the friction that exists between people that can’t be explained through simple personality clashes. Everyone has a story, even people who are vicious 'for no reason.' Taylor shows us that there are always reasons ... Just a few words do a lot of work in Taylor’s prose. In tight phrases, he sums up entire experiences that offer both clarity as well as a little mystery ... a great collection for any diehard novel-readers who are nervous or otherwise skeptical to venture into short story territory. But if you’re not afraid of short stories, of a little violence, or of a lot of pain, this is still a collection to keep.
There are short stories that give you a slice of a character’s life, just a moment in time, and then there are short stories that draw you in fully and bring you into a rich and complete emotional world. The stories in Brandon Taylor’s collection, Filthy Animals, fall into the latter category. It is not just because they are often connected, allowing readers to meet characters and encounter them again later; it is because Taylor masterfully creates the interior spaces of his figures and balances them with compelling exterior settings and circumstances ... often dark, especially in the title piece, where a high school party goes horribly awry. There is hope here as well, often more vested in the reader than the characters themselves, who struggle with mental and physical health issues, complicated relationships with family, partners and friends, and feelings of isolation and being different. In this shrewdly perceptive and impactful collection, Taylor delivers nuanced and rich stories with a steady hand. His characters are multilayered, obviously flawed, powerful in ways they cannot realize, and all too real. This potent book, with its terrible violence and aching tenderness, is highly recommended.
... displays [Taylor's] talent for rendering the precise inflection of a relationship while exploring the drama of the body ... This world of frail bodies and vulnerable minds might seem grim; but when we let loose our instincts, the results can also be marvellous.
... manages to deliver both a strong running theme and a deep exploration of three recurring main characters ... a fully realized exploration of what it means to need and desire another person, his characters precariously balanced on the knife-edge between exhilaration and self-destruction ... a bravura performance, an emphatic statement of literary power from a writer whose first novel was Booker shortlisted.
A story collection full of vital insight into murky human interactions ... The settings here are bleak—alienated suburbs; petty college campuses—and the mood unsparing. But the daring in these stories is bracing ... Taylor tackles a variety of taboos and articulates the comfortless sides of the soul, and it's thrilling to watch.
Taylor demonstrates that his talent is not limited to just the novel form. In these stories, Taylor applies his keen observation of the human condition to a cast of characters navigating a slew of challenges: a recent mental health crisis, a career-threatening injury, a fraught relationship dynamic, a complicated job situation ... Many of the stories are set in Wisconsin, and many stories are linked, with characters from earlier stories resurfacing in later ones. The effect is a collection that depicts a community of people and their relationship to their Midwestern setting with detail and depth. Taylor’s authentic dialogue, resonant imagery, and thoughtful observation combine to form a volume that readers will savor for its rich explorations of the everyday. Filthy Animals further solidifies that Taylor’s future writings are ones to look out for, in whatever form they come.
Taylor follows his Booker shortlisted Real Life with a sharp, surprising collection ... Taylor’s language sparks with the tension of beauty and cruelty, conveying a sense of desire and the pleasures of food and sex complicated by capricious behavior. The author has an impressive range, and his depictions of complex characters trapped in untenable situations are hard to forget.
Contemplating the intersection of love and violence, emotional and bodily, these stunning stories showcase the sensibility displayed in Taylor’s much-loved and -lauded debut, Real Life.
The connective tissue in Brandon Taylor’s Filthy Animals takes a little getting used to ... The thematic consistency across Filthy Animals is a positive when it comes to establishing tone and the motifs that most interest Taylor, although it does mean that a couple of the stories feel a little redundant ... a few of the disaffected characters – the men, in particular – have the tendency to blend into each other. Taylor’s melding of a continuing narrative with separate stories is interesting, but it isn’t always conducted seamlessly ... Whilst, when considered as a singular work, Filthy Animals both doesn’t quite hang together and hangs together too well, on an individual basis many of these stories are beautiful. Taylor’s prose is a beguiling mix of cool and sensual. His characters speak with a provocative, sometimes cruel bluntness that belies their vulnerable hearts. It is not a friendly world that these people inhabit; any kindnesses are stuffed deep down beneath surfaces made of grit and steel. Yet, despite their hard exteriors, despite the brusque ways in which they treat each other, you can’t help but feel for them.
If there was an emotion that summed up Real Life, it was ennui; Filthy Animals is a generally grimmer, more violent book ... Yet it is perhaps down to the consistent brilliance of Lionel’s narrative that apart from 'Anne of Cleves' – a tender story about Marta, who, having left her husband, begins tentatively dating a woman – the rest of this collection feels anaemic ... Too often Taylor chooses a shocking event – someone dying or an unspeakable act of violence, say – when really he is at his best when writing moments of charged understatement, where tension builds to a point where the smallest movement or word feels earth-shattering ... The story of Lionel would make an excellent novella, and there it is, just waiting to be cut away from the mostly inconsequential tales that pad out this book.
