Unlikely Animals

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2022

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Prologue-Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Part 6

Part 7

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

Beta

Discussion Questions

Prologue-Part 1Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 1: “The Dog”

Prologue Summary: “The Cats”

Content Warning: This section of the guide contains references to substance use disorder, mental illness, and suicide.

The narrators, who are revealed as the dead buried at Maple Street Cemetery, recall Emma Starling’s birth. Emma made the local news because the midwife who delivered her claimed that the baby’s touch had cured her sciatica. As she grows up, Emma’s parents realize she has the power to expedite the natural healing process. Renowned for her gift and intellect, everyone expects great things of Emma. She graduated with honors from UCLA and is starting medical school. She travels home for Thanksgiving to see her father, Clive, who is dying of a rare brain disease. Clive, a poetry professor, has been forced to retire mid-semester after hallucinating small animals in the classroom, asking his confused students “who let the cats in here?” (6).

Part 1, Chapter 1 Summary

As Emma drives into Everton, the ghosts read her thoughts and learn that things have not gone to plan in California. Emma is apprehensive about seeing her father again; she can’t forgive him for cheating on her mother. Emma adopted a large white stray dog, Moses, that she found on the roadside. The ghosts are excited about Emma’s arrival, hoping that “just this once, maybe someone would cheat death” (12).

Emma notes that the trees have missing persons posters stapled to them. She cannot read them from the car, but the ghosts share that the missing person is Emma’s best friend from high school, Crystal Nash. The posters were made by Emma’s father. The opioid crisis is causing many young people to go missing.

Emma worries about telling her parents that she is not in medical school.

Part 1, Chapter 2 Summary

Emma’s family lives in the caretaker’s lodge of Corbin Mansion. She has not seen them in two years. They missed her graduation because her brother, Auggie, was in a rehabilitation facility. Emma finds her father and Ralph Kelsey, the 91-year-old owner of the local gun factory and Corbin Mansion, on the porch.

When Moses leaps around on the grass, Clive comments that he is “playing with Harold” (19), and Emma’s mother, Ingrid, quietly reminds her that, as a result of his sickness, Clive sees the ghost of the naturalist Ernest Harold Baynes.

Emma’s brother, Auggie, joins them, greeting his sister as G.G., which she assumes means “Golden Girl.” Emma feels awkward when her father refers to her as his favorite child in front of her brother, and Ingrid is uncomfortable when Auggie jokes that she has a crush on Clive’s doctor.

The ghosts remark that Harold is trying to help Clive solve the mystery of Crystal’s disappearance. Harold was cremated, and his ashes were scattered over Corbin Park so, unlike the other ghosts, whose bodies were buried, he wanders freely and is not confined to the cemetery.

Part 1, Chapter 3 Summary

The chapter contains a newspaper cutting from 1904 describing an encounter with Harold that Ingrid sent Emma as an email attachment. The journalist and his wife meet Harold in the lodge he shares with animals from the park. They meet skunks, a coyote, and Harold’s beloved pet fox, The Sprite. Harold talks about raising a baby bear, Jimmie, who had to be rehomed at New York Zoological Gardens. Harold is married but has a reputation as a womanizer. The author reflects on the unspoiled, natural beauty of Corbin Park as an antidote to modern life.

Part 1, Chapter 4 Summary

After dinner, Emma sees one of the missing persons posters and asks her parents about Crystal. The two friends stopped speaking, but Crystal remained close to Emma’s parents. Crystal developed a substance use disorder and addiction to heroin, and Ingrid is privately convinced she is dead. Clive had her declared a missing person and hopes that Emma will be able to help him solve the case. Emma sends Crystal a message, informing her of Clive’s sickness and asking her to get in touch.

Crystal was the daughter of the groundskeeper at Corbin Mansion. Her mother died by suicide before she moved to New Hampshire. Crystal was older than Emma and defined herself as a “Wiccan.” Crystal approached Emma when she learned about her healing powers. The girls set up a business called the Gentle Touch Healing Society together, meeting clients at McDonald’s. Crystal began holding hands with the clients, claiming that she had also cultivated the healing touch, or charismata iamaton.

Crystal and Emma fell out shortly before Emma left for college. Emma was assaulted by a client and quit their business. When Crystal’s father died suddenly of a heart attack, she responded coldly to Emma’s text message condolences.

Part 1, Chapter 5 Summary

Part 1, Chapter 6 Summary

The dead reflect on the rules that prevent them from helping to solve the mystery of Crystal’s disappearance. If a dead soul meddles in the world of the living, their spirit will explode. If, however, they stop caring about the living, their spirit shrivels. The dead do not know if there is anything after their current state.

Prologue-Part 1 Analysis

In this section, Emma Starling is presented as exceptional—the sole gifted person and healer in her small town. Emma was always expected to do great things, and she left for college and medical school in California. However, this self-image is shattered when she finds her gift of healing gone and subsequently drops out of medical school. She goes back home to see her father, whose life she is now powerless to save. Emma has thus far perceived The Nature of Healing as being the practice of a select, elite few, belonging to the realm of the miraculous. In the early chapters, both the dead narrators and Crystal draw comparisons between Emma, Christ, and the Christian saints. Through the loss of her gifts, Emma’s sense of self is also lost, and when she tells her family, they are disappointed that she will be unable to save her father. Moreover, her former best friend, Crystal, has also, in a sense, been lost—she is missing in a town full of inhabitants who have substance use disorders. As such, the town Emma returns to is darker than it was when she left it, especially because she thought her future held brighter opportunities. Now, there is no knowing if she will ever leave again, as her exceptionality is presented as her only means of escape.

The Complex Relationship Between Humans and Animals is introduced in the contrast between the joyful simplicity and spontaneity of Moses’s emotions in comparison to the conflicted dynamics within the Starling family. Moses has an immediate affinity with the ailing Clive Starling, even running to play with the ghost of Harold, whom the rest of the family considers to be Clive’s hallucination. Further, Clive’s affinity with the animal world grows as he loses his short-term memory and lives increasingly in the moment. From the onset, relationships between humans and animals are made central—Emma picked up Moses on her drive from California, and the newspaper article about Harold explores his deep connection with animals in Corbin Park, where Emma returns. These connections foreshadow even deeper relationships and interactions to come, particularly between Clive and Moses, who works hard to save Clive’s life.

In the interview with Harold, the theme of The Complex Relationship Between Humans and Animals is also furthered by the romantic and idealized picture of Corbin Park and Harold’s relationship with the animals with whom he shares his house. However, the story of Jimmie the bear suggests that Harold’s lifestyle was perhaps not always safe. Of Harold himself, we learn that he was no saint but “[h]ad once bedded half the ladies of the town” (26). This parallels with Clive, who is unforgiven by his wife and daughter for a past affair.

The identity of the narrating Chorus of the Dead is only revealed in the closing sentence of the Prologue. The dead narrators have lived for varying lengths of time and in different historical periods. Their names are always followed by their dates of birth and death, as reproduced on their gravestones. The dead of Everton appear to be in a kind of limbo, living in the human world and still very much engaged with worldly events, but invisible and powerless to intervene in human affairs. They are unsure if the afterlife extends beyond their present state, as well as what becomes of those who go against the perceived expectations of the ghosts, whether by exploding for meddling in human affairs or “going quiet” for losing interest in them (48). Unlike the interventionist gods of classical narratives or the intercessional saints of Christianity, the dead of Everton achieve little by watching over and taking an interest in the vicissitudes of the living. As they themselves put it, they are “not exactly guardian angels” (46). However, they are full of emotion and hope that Emma’s powers will return now that she is home. The Chorus of the Dead and Emma’s powers both speak to the magical realism found within the text, as they both appear as normal aspects of life. The ghostly chorus, however, is unknown to the characters, though Clive, as he approaches death, can see the ghost of Harold, who was cremated and thus is able to travel beyond the cemetery.

Corbin Park and Everton both represent a crossing over of two worlds: The dead and the living overlap in Everton, and exotic, imported animals live within Corbin Park. Corbin Park is described as an untouched wilderness and a return to pre-modern times, and, though it is man-made, it almost acts as a portal, inviting magic in the form of gifts and ghostly watchers. Emma’s return to Everton to care for her father, which speaks to the theme of Childhood and Intergenerational Care, also offers hope for Crystal, as Clive has been inspired by the ghosts to help find Crystal in his final days. Indeed, the flyers all over Everton were posted by Clive, and Emma must face her feelings of anger toward her father, as well as her brother’s substance use disorder and Crystal’s disappearance.