Jonathan R. Miller will admit with a laugh that a lot of the elements in his latest book, Animal Control, sound “ridiculous” when you try to explain them to someone. But for Miller—who has spent a lot of time thinking about the world’s problems and how young people see them—those strange, absurd touches serve a purpose. They offset the novel’s darker elements and its unsettling questions about the real cost of enacting change. “When you finally get that power, when you can actually change things, it’s easy to go down paths you didn’t intend,” Miller says.

Born in Illinois, Miller grew up between Los Alamos and Albuquerque, New Mexico, before relocating to the Bay Area in 1992 to attend Stanford, where he has lived ever since. He first studied biology, hoping to become a veterinarian, but drifted toward English and the social sciences. After graduating, he taught middle school in Oakland for seven years before moving into marketing and communications in the sustainability side of the tech world.

Through all these changes, Miller kept returning to writing. By 2010, he began taking it more seriously, even drafting a 10-year plan for his novels. At the time, he was working for a semiconductor company, but during his breaks, and even his commute, he was putting that plan into action. “I’d have the laptop in the passenger seat while driving,” he says. “It’s the Bay Area; there’s traffic. At every stop, I would be typing. It was every free moment.”

Those stolen moments led to several published novels by 2020. Miller admits he wasn’t exactly where he hoped to be but was proud of the work he’d done and even considered stopping. Still, there was one story he kept returning to, which would become this year’s Animal Control, a book that begins in realism before introducing something impossible, exciting, and deeply strange.

Kirkus Reviews calls Animal Control “a novel that places readers squarely in the mindset of young people who feel powerless to fix their problems… the excellent twist is that when they get that power, it only creates more perplexing questions with unclear solutions.” Miller explores that disillusionment through 17-year-old Shay Garner, who drifts between a troubled home life and a growing cynicism about the world around her. That cynicism only deepens as she joins groups trying to enact change, like her school’s after-school environmental club:

It seems apparent that the solution doesn’t involve spending an afternoon posing in front of the waves holding an empty Hefty bag high in the air with gracefully extended arms so that it can billow open dramatically like a ship’s sail as the rest of the group breathlessly captures the moment for social media (#TrashEndsWithUs)… It’s an outdoor meetup group that holds periodic social events, which is fine—just call yourself what you are, especially if you’re not working to get any better.

Shay’s disillusionment doesn’t last long before Miller tilts her world with the arrival of Corvus—a masked, bandaged figure with pincer hooks for hands—who offers her a strange gift: a clam shell that allows her to control the actions of animals, even humans. While thrilling at first, that power quickly leads to difficult moral questions about using it to “save” the world.

Miller says he was less concerned with logic than with feeling when it came to Corvus and Shay’s powers. “I wanted that playfulness to offset the darkness in the rest of it. I wanted there to be memorable elements that helped carry people through to the end and make it special.” The fantasy, he says, became a way to engage more deeply with reality. “I like using the medium to comment on real society,” he says. “That’s where I think I have the most angst—the actual state of the society that I see and that my daughter is growing up in.”

Miller’s daughter, now nearly 18, has influenced his work, prompting him to think more about how young people see the world. His years teaching in East Oakland also left a mark. “It was a difficult environment that had all the challenges people stereotypically associate with Oakland,” he recalls. “They definitely had a huge impact on me.” Those experiences shaped his decision to center Animal Control on a younger protagonist. “The world just seems more difficult,” he says. “So I wanted to have a young person trying to navigate this.”

Chief among the issues Miller believes make the world more difficult is climate change, which becomes a central element in Animal Control, though he is careful not to treat it as a single problem. “I don’t isolate it from other issues,” he says. “I think it’s related to inequality and poverty and discrimination.” He also sees a broader erosion of civil rights and a disregard for facts, science, and truth—an awareness that runs throughout the book as Shay gains the power to address these problems.

In the same way that Miller sees climate change as intertwined with other crises, identity is also crucial to Animal Control, though handled in a surprising way. The three girls at the center of the novel are racially ambiguous, described only as “not exactly fair-skinned.” The son of an African American father and a Norwegian mother, Miller says his background has shaped how he handles perspective.

“I think what being multicultural has given me personally is a real empathy around the oppression that all groups feel, whether it’s racial or due to anything else,” he explains. By not explicitly naming his characters’ ethnicities, Miller hopes he’s crafted three-dimensional figures readers can connect with on their own terms. “That’s what I always try to do, let people map their assumptions onto these characters rather than me write them.”

Opposing these serious elements is Corvus, who offers one of the novel’s brightest surprises. Explaining exactly what makes him so fantastical would spoil a fun reveal, but Miller says that absurdity was essential in balancing lightness with darkness. “I wanted an element of just something so fantastical and impossible to predict,” he says.

Miller admits it was challenging to make so many weird elements fit into a realistic world, blending darker social themes with outlandish imagery. But the thread running through it all is Shay’s desire to fix things. “Fundamentally, it’s about desperately wanting to change the world and finally getting the power to do so,” Miller says. “And then how, when you try to do it—even if you have great intentions—your efforts can fall short.”

Unintended consequences to Shay’s actions even lead her to seem villainous at times, but Miller hopes what keeps her relatable is her uncertainty. He says he wishes people in power would sometimes act with a little less confidence, questioning their motives and intentions. “I hope that Shay was kind of an embodiment of that idea,” he says, “to make people question—with that power, are you still able to question what you can do?”

Ultimately, what ties the dark and light elements of Animal Control together is the sense that the world itself is just as absurd as an electronic clam handed to you by a man with pincers for hands—and maybe the efforts to change it are, too. But Miller hopes that by recognizing those absurdities, there can still be hope. “We don’t have the answers, but we need to try to do something in spite of that,” he says.

Rhett Morgan is a writer and translator based in Paris.