Kira Jane Buxton's Hollow Kingdom introduced an unforgettable crowtagonist in S.T., a human-raised crow fond of pop-culture allusions and relentless animal puns. In Feral Creatures, S.T. carries on his hilariously narrated postapocalyptic adventures in a sequel that expands and evolves Buxton's post-human world. As in her first book, Buxton excels at managing tone, quickly shifting from outrageously silly jokes to darker meditations on humanity's destructive impact on nature. Feral Creatures is a largely stand-alone adventure story about parenthood in a frightening era, but it never takes its anthropomorphized animals so seriously that the novel becomes yet another apocalyptic slog. S.T. is always there to lighten the mood with a joke about Cheetos.
Feral Creatures opens with S.T. hiding away Dee, the last MoFo (S.T.'s characteristically profane term for human beings) in a remote cabin in Alaska, where S.T. raises her like his own fledgling. In the previous book, humans were decimated by a virus that left them zombie-like, and the animals that take over in their absence are not always inclined to look kindly on Dee's species. After calamitous events force the pair into a journey to Portland, S.T. is forced to reckon with the threats that have developed while they were away, particularly the horrifying evolution the Changed Ones (virus-afflicted humans) have undergone. For all of its fantasy-influenced epic scale and its horror-influenced nightmarish beings, Feral Creatures is chiefly about the often-frustrated desire to protect our loved ones and preserve them exactly as we want them to be. --Hank Stephenson, the Sun magazine, manuscript reader