Strange Animals
by Jarod K. AndersonGenres: Fantasy & Magic
Published on February 10, 2026
Pages: 309
Format: eBook Source: Library
Green trips on the curb, falls flat into the street, and sees the city bus speeding toward him. And then . . . blink. He’s back on the curb, miraculously still alive. A five-foot-tall crow watches him from atop a nearby sign, somehow unseen by the rushing crowd of morning commuters.
Desperate for answers and beset by more visions of impossible creatures, Green finds his way to a remote campsite in the Appalachian Mountains, where he meets a centuries-old teacher and begins an apprenticeship unlike anything he could imagine.
Under his new mentor’s grouchy tutelage, Green studies the time-bending rag moth, the glass fawn, and the menacing horned wolf. He begins to see past hidden nature’s terrors and glimpse its beauty, all while befriending fellow misfits—and finding connection and community.
Along the way come clues about the forces that set him on this path—and, most incredibly, a sense of purpose and fulfillment like nothing he’s felt before.
But Green’s new happiness promises to be short-lived, because alongside these marvels lurks a deadly threat to this place he’s already come to love.
The beginning:
Green died and then he didn’t.
I can’t really tell you what this book is about. I guess, at its most basic, it is the story of a man who finds out that magic creatures are real. Then he has to help fight one that is killing people around his new home. But what I enjoyed about this book was the quirky secondary characters.
I loved Dancer, the campground owner. She can’t see the creatures but she supports her tenants who say they can. She just keeps coming around and giving them warm ugly hats and tea in mugs that they need to return so that she can refill it for them again.
I loved the guys at the gas station. One of them was constantly trying to perfect a card trick where he pulls the card you are thinking of out of a deck. Chekhov’s gun would lead you to believe that that was going to be important in this story. It completely was not. I love that.
There was a creature that eats bad feelings. There was a communication device run by fungi. I really like stories with highly imaginative details like that.
I’m looking forward to seeing what this author writes next.
So, I was mad or damned and in practical terms I wasn’t sure which was worse. There were always cautionary tales about wayward women in other families. The sanitarium. The nunnery. Places you were put to be forgotten. Oubliettes the menfolk could pretend were a kindness.
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