The stories in Among Animals 3 support the Ashland Creek Press mission to publish works that “foster an appreciation for nature and the animal kingdom.” Thoughtful, humorous, inventive, gruesome, and occasionally fantastical, they portray the beauty and brutality of wild, domestic, and human animal lives and interactions. A common thread is human cruelty to animals and each other, while some stories provide relief from the horror. Readers can never truly understand what it is like to be a bird or horse or jaguar, but narration from the animals’ perspective in a few of the stories attempts to do so in an interesting way. Unsympathetic human stereotypes won’t win over any readers to the cause of animal rights, but may provoke new ways of thinking about all the creatures in the world with whom we live. ( )

The collection promises to challenge, enlighten and inspire you. Most of the stories fail to do that. I would like to single out 3 of the tales that accomplished this goal.
Survival Skills is a humorous look at wildlife and their habitat loss written in the form of an explanation letter to an insurance company. The story made me smile several times.
One Trick Pony is the sad story of a stunt horse forced to perform a "necessary" stunt.
Liftoff is the best story in the collection. The author makes you feel everything the character is feeling: every emotion, every fear, every pain, every confusion, and every loss from the first to the last word of the story. ( )

The American writer George Saunders, in his wonderful and thought-provoking “master class” book "A Swim in a Pond in the Rain," observes that “[many...writers] understand the story as a delivery system for their ideas... A story was where I got to set the world straight and achieve glory via the sheer originality of my advanced moral positions. But as a technical matter, fiction doesn’t support polemic very well.”

For all my sympathy for the aims and feelings evinced in this collection of sixteen stories, I found that most of the time, the “polemic” and “moral positions” of the ideas overrode the art and craft of fiction. The preaching is mostly to the choir, and while the language may be skillful, the imagery vivid (even lurid), and the intentions laudable, the sermons generally don’t transcend into art that breathes into a reader’s heart and mind. “One Trick Pony,” for example, reads like an assemblage of notes gathered in the library or online, and then patched together into something resembling a “story,” but would have been far more forceful as a journalistic piece. The value of “For the Animals” is the picture it paints of the failings of a large animal rights organization: the bureaucracy, the compromises, the conflicting agendas and hypocrisies of those who run and work for it, and the price paid by the zealots. But the characters are wooden stand-ins; there’s too much dithering and not much arc. “The Pet Project” has similar problems – a vivid depiction of the potential for disaster in the most well-intentioned project, but the characters are nearly indistinguishable, and it goes on much too long. “Behind the Chokecherry” has an original premise: it is narrated by the soul of a pig who has been eaten by a number of different people in a Mormon-like cult at a carnivorous festival. The pig, from the guts of her eaters, can observe what those people have felt and thought and experienced. But it too goes on much too long, and relies too much on brutal descriptions of the violence perpetrated on the animals butchered for the festival as well as the violence the humans to do each other.

The best stories set themselves up with tight focus, a believable point of view, and something that reaches beyond just how humans mistreat animals. “Survival Skills” is one, taking the form of a contested insurance claim submitted by a frustrated homeowner. It is sly and clever, skewering the suburbanites whose housing developments devastate wildlife habitat while wearing T-shirts proclaiming their love for their local mountain lions; who eagerly text each other about a lion trapped in their midst and tow their toddlers along in the scrum of gawkers, while the one person who desperately wants to help the lion escape safely pays a high (if also pretty funny) price. “Flying Home” is also a lovely piece, in which a dying Covid patient clings to the view of busy, active crows and a hawk outside her window as a last link to the outside world, not fully understanding what their presence there means until the end. And sometimes just the deeply-observed and horrific details of a chicken slaughterhouse in “Everything That Can Go Wrong with a Body” are beautiful in the language used to describe them, and in the effects they have on an older woman and a teenaged boy who work there.

The overall theme in this collection is the “evil that men do,” and how even those who try to do good (who are often the women!) usually fail. The first story, “The Art of Dying,” is the only one with a flare of the wonder of an intimate encounter between an ill woman and a crow, but it is obscured by the drama and selfishness of the narrator’s needs. In “Liftoff,” there is a fleeting bond between the ape narrator and an attentive caretaker – but the caretaker ultimately is a participant in the death of the ape. Maybe Among Animals 4 will find some room for stories of love, protection, and the soul-expanding joy of our bonds with animals which are lacking in this volume, and may do more to move and engage than simply appall readers.