A review by pearloz
Fauna by Christiane Vadnais

3.0

Short environmental/eco horror (horror-lite?). These semi-linked stories follow, vaguely, Laura (though she's not in every story), as she finds, traces, studies a new parasite that attacks humans and non-humans alike, causes them to mutate (some are...fish people? Laura becomes a...bird, I think?) rapidly, but throughout there's this impending sense of doom, like she's just noting how the world is gonna end for people as we know it, and not to have a chance to save it. These brief snapshots allude to a greater fracas in the world, each snapshot exhibits tropes of the post-apocalyptic fiction genre: there's the religious fanatics that try to recreate biblical scenes (the thing w/ the lion cage), there's cult leader and his followers, the desperate scientist, and then, in perhaps a new trope related to eco/enviro horror/apocalypse lit, we get a character in two separate chapters, one where he's a normal dude, one where it ends with him in water w/ a dorsal fin, and our scientist, whenever she appears in a new chapter, is farther along in her evolution to becoming a bird (those are rapid evolutions). Sold blast of fiction.