Night of the Animals

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The novel employs language from both fading and emerging dialects and slang of Birmingham, the Black Country, old Worcestershire, and the Clee Hills region of England, from Guyana, as well as future-set, speculative words and phrases along with common phrases from British English. With more arcane or esoteric regionalisms, or opaque terms, footnotes are added where I felt they would help readers better appreciate the story.

ON THE LAST DAY OF APRIL OF 2052, AS A NEWLY discovered comet, Urga-Rampos, neared Earth, a very ill, very old, and very corpulent man started to shoulder his way into the thick hedges around the last public zoo on earth. Cuthbert Handley, a freshly minted nonagenarian — and a newly homeless one — clambered into the shrubbery as fast as his large, frail bones allowed (which wasn’t very). As the tough branches of yew and hazel abraded his arms and neck and face, he hardly felt them: what stung him was consciousness, every last red, lashing ray of it.

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