Strange Animals
Jarod K. Anderson
Hardcover/EBook/Audiobook
ISBN: 979-8217092468
Ballantine Books, February 2026, 320 pages

Greetings, readers, and welcome back to another book review! This month, we’re packing our bags, leaving the big city behind, and heading out to the Appalachian Mountains to hang out with weird people and witness even wilder events in Strange Animals, a delightfully creepy novel by Jarod K. Anderson!

Strange Animals follows the story of a man named Green, an everyday corporate wage monkey who abruptly quits his job after getting run over by a bus and killed. Green has a problem (besides being dead), which is that a five-foot-tall crow that only he can see saved him, so he never actually died (leading to the slow erosion of his sanity). And clutching to an acorn that may or may not be magical, he finds his way to the Appalachian Mountains, drawn by an inexplicable sense that he needs to be out in the deep wilderness, rediscovering how to connect with nature. Green’s second problem is that he doesn’t actually know how to live in nature and is quickly in danger of dying (again, this time by exposure), but luckily for him, he falls under the tutelage of his campsite neighbor Valentina, one of the world’s foremost cryptozoologists (someone who studies animals that don’t exist), and things rapidly get weirder from there.

Will Green learn how to start a fire? Possibly! Will eldritch creatures lurking beyond the bounds of space and time make an appearance? Most certainly! Is there cheese on toast? Absolutely! Does any of this make sense right now? No, and I laugh at your linear concepts of time!

When I first started reading Strange Animals, I was immediately struck by the evocative prose and world-building that seemed to flow almost effortlessly from the pages. Anderson plunges us into lush descriptions of places and people, but always lurking beneath the initial glimpse is the sense that something older and far more terrifying is peeking back out (this book is literally the first time I’ve been concerned trees might be conspiring against us). The introduction of cryptids and cryptozoology slides seamlessly into the waking fever dream that Green’s life becomes. Looking even deeper, however, reveals a heartfelt and poignant love of nature, with all its dangers and mysteries, and I very much appreciated how Green’s quest to connect with the mysterious new reality around him reflected Anderson’s obvious love for our very real world.

The other thing I really liked about this book is that while certain elements initially appear to be “civilization versus wilderness,” Anderson deftly weaves Green’s journey so that both he and the reader ultimately understand that there is no conflict, there is simply the reality of living on a planet we do not always fully comprehend, and how sometimes that can lead to edges scraping against each other. What at first looks like an intractable fight is very often a failure to understand and respect the nature of things, and I thought Anderson did a particularly delightful job of illustrating this throughout the entire story, both with the eclectic cast of characters as well as the various crypto-organisms Green comes across.

Overall, while Strange Animals has an overtly eldritch theme, and there are plenty of fascinating cryptids wandering its leafy pages, it is, at its heart, the eternal struggle of human beings trying to feel connected to the world and people surrounding them, and the many forms that may take. If you’re a fan of nature, things that go bump in the night, or just like reading extremely well-executed writing, you should do yourself a favor and check this one out.