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.
...[a] wonderful doorstop of a book ... Broun packs his novel with futuristic invention, Chablis-dry humor and a thick, dreamy nostalgia for the midsummer mayhem of Puck and his retinue ... a story as wildly moving and singular as an animal’s eyes in the dark.
The book’s plot indeed dovetails eerily with some recent events — Brexit, terrorism — but in this smartly written dystopian novel, things are even worse than the headlines ... Broun’s debut will have readers cheering for Cuthbert even as they question the man’s sanity.
Broun's heartfelt and original story is another reminder of human transgressions against the creatures with whom we share the planet ... Broun's tale is a cautionary one, set in a future that's already underway. We don't need to travel forward in time to see how humans are decimating already endangered populations in the animal world.
Transpiring over a single night and focused so tightly on such an eccentric protagonist, Night of the Animals sometimes feels in danger of becoming claustrophobic, repetitive in both its external action and internal philosophizing. But just when Cuthbert’s obsessive fretting threatens to overwhelm the novel’s narrative flow, Broun wisely introduces other point-of-view characters to widen the story’s scope ... Readers of Night of the Animals will likely be reminded of Kurt Vonnegut and Philip K. Dick and, perhaps, John Irving ... With a climax both moving and exhilarating, Night of the Animals is an unpredictable, inventive, futuristic gloss on Noah’s ark.
The book seamlessly transitions from dystopian satire to psychological melodrama to pure pulp (and back again) ... The Night of the Animals is a stunner of a book: thoughtful and elegiac, with long, lyrical sentences, and a tricky structure that will keep you guessing. It’s worth your time.
