ENCOUNTERS WITH UNEXPECTED ANIMALS

In a dozen stories, men and boys of Texas cope with loss and anxiety, and cross paths with a menagerie of wildlife.

The “unexpected animals” are literal in almost all the stories in Johnston’s second story collection, following the novel We Burn Daylight (2024): snakes, horses, ferrets, dogs, a caiman lizard; cameos by deer and brown pelican, albatross, elephants, and more. Among the exceptions are the title story—in that one, the wild thing is a teenage girl. Johnston gives his regular-guy male protagonists a lot to handle; some do better than others. Anxious fathers often fall short, younger protagonists learn the hard way that tragedy, loss, and the inscrutability of other people are here to stay. Little kids can be abducted or suffer terrible injury; parents can run off or die. The seriousness of these themes is lightened somewhat by quirky elements and snappy dialogue. In “Paradeability,” a widowed dad takes his son, aka Po’ Boy the Hoboy, to a clown convention. In “Dixon,” violent confrontations and a missing daughter share space with an embezzled shipment of Dairy Queen kids’ meal toys. In “Miss McElroy,” a young man whose parents have died visits the home of an older woman he was obsessed with in his younger years; her always scary son, now a former Marine, is living at home post-Afghanistan, amusing himself by copying porn images in charcoal. “If failing to buy your crazy son a stack of Hustlers is on the ballot, I’ve got Mother of the Year stitched up,” she notes. “Time of the Preacher,” a pandemic rendezvous which also appears in The Best American Short Stories 2025, is the closest the collection comes to a lighter mood. The last story, “Half of What Atlee Rouse Knows About Horses,” contains the book’s most unforgettable scene, in which the aging, diminished protagonist watches a wild stallion save a drowning colt. Maybe there is hope?

The author’s empathy for his troubled characters illuminates their predicaments and mistakes with a solemn, steady light.