The Animal Room

by Lauren Acampora

From the award-winning author of The Wonder Garden comes a set of linked stories spotlighting human-animal relations—and revealing the tensions that threaten to fracture a suburban New England community

Tensions simmer in small-town Connecticut. A city transplant is haunted by the deer carcass hanging in her neighbor’s garage. A psychiatric patient believes she’s becoming a bird. A disgraced oil executive invites his granddaughter’s kindergarten class to tour his home menagerie—what could go wrong? Rumors spread and fires burn in this second short story collection from award-winning author Lauren Acampora.

As in Acampora’s debut The Wonder Garden, The Animal Room delves deep into the town of Old Cranbury and its eclectic mix of residents. Incisive and moving, these stories chart the interconnected lives of neighbors, relatives, coworkers, enemies, lovers, and the animals around them, turning an unflinching eye to the natural world to shed light on human nature. Through its riveting ensemble, The Animal Room paints a kaleidoscopic portrait of contemporary American life that is strikingly unique.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Animals, Audiobook, Horror

368 pages, Hardcover

Published June 9, 2026

About the author

Lauren Acampora is the author of two novels, The Paper Wasp and The Hundred Waters, and two collections of linked stories, The Wonder Garden and The Animal Room (June 2026), all published by Grove Atlantic. The Animal Room features the story “Dominion,” which was selected for The Best American Short Stories 2025.

The Hundred Waters was named one of Vogue’s best books of the year, a LitHub best book of the summer, and one of The Millions’ most-anticipated books of 2022.

Lauren’s first novel, The Paper Wasp was named a Best Summer Read by The New York Times Book Review, USA Today, Oprah Magazine, ELLE, Town & Country, BBC.com, Daily Mail (UK), Tatler, Thrillist, and Publishers Weekly, as well as a Best Indie Novel of 2019 by Chicago Review of Books. It was also longlisted for The Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize and nominated for the Kirkus Prize.

The Wonder Garden, a debut collection of linked stories, was named a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection and an Indie Next selection, and was chosen as one of the best books of 2015 by Amazon and NPR. It won the GLCA New Writers Award and was a finalist for the New England Book Award. It was on the longlist for The Story Prize and nominated for the Kirkus Prize.

Lauren’s short fiction and other writing has appeared or is forthcoming in publications such as The Paris Review, One Story, New England Review, Story Magazine, Guernica, Missouri Review, The Common, Prairie Schooner, Antioch Review, The New York Times, LitHub, and The Best American Short Stories 2025.

She graduated from Brown University, earned an MFA at Brooklyn College, and has received fellowships from MacDowell, Ucross, Ragdale Foundation, Art OMI, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. Lauren lives in Westchester County, New York with her husband, daughter, and rescue dog.

Reviews

[Debbie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Pogo stick time!

These short stories, these exquisite stories, this is why I love books! Bouncing, bouncing, bouncing! Bowing to the author here, who knows how to write tight, exciting stories about our life with creatures.

I’m in awe of the author’s ability to make us look at all sorts of animals in all sorts of ways. The animals take a back seat (they aren’t characters in the stories) but we are ever aware of their huge presence. As I started each story I was thinking, oh goodie, some other animal will be here now! Wonder what it will be? And who will be the people involved with it? It reminds me of how I felt when I read The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry, where books and the book world appear in all different ways. Or when I read No Two Persons, about a book that ends up in 9 different hands. Both books are heavenly gems and made me feel so good inside! Here, I felt the same—the variety of animals alone floors me. Animals served up in all different ways!

In each of the long-ish short stories, we see some important, touching, passionate, human-animal interaction. In other words, there is high drama in each (which I didn’t see coming—I love the surprise element!). I will add that most of the stories are dark. I happen to like dark, so that worked for me.

There’s a deer hunter who has a freaked-out woman next door. We have a rich guy who creates an exotic zoo. We have a couple who goes on a safari, a violent kid whose mom gets obsessed with fish, a guy who buries roadkill. A lesbian couple who are animal activists. A woman who hoards dogs, a guy who trains a police dog to attack, a girl who likes a bug that’s considered a pest. A woman who thinks she’s a bird, another woman who tests mice in a lab, a nursing home that brings in animals to make the old folks happy. Heard enough? Each story is juicy, with some big event that is dramatic, unexpected, and oh so well written. I can’t say I had a favorite, I loved each one!

The stories are linked, but just marginally. It’s so much fun to run into someone we’ve met earlier, but who we suddenly get a different view of. Each story definitely can stand on its own.

The common thread in all the stories is how passionate each main character is about animals, no matter how strange the connection might be. As I’ve said, I’m so impressed with the variety of human-animal interactions.

I loved it that there isn’t one dud among the thirteen stories. The stories are so rich and absorbing, and the characters so vivid and robust, it seems the writer packs a novel-type complexity into each short story.

My only complaint is that there usually isn’t closure. I like to see things tied up. But I let it slide here, because the stories are so damn good! Sometimes I wondered what would have happened to these characters later, but often we get a peek of it in another story, so that is satisfying. Sort of like we hear gossip about them.

It took me a long time to read this one, but it’s because I didn’t want the stories to stop coming. I wanted to look forward to a good story all the time. I now want to read other books by this author, though this will be a hard act to follow, since it is so unique and has an animal theme.

Thanks to NetGalley and Edelweiss for an advance copy.

Expected publication date: June 9, 2026

[Karen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thirteen linked stories taking place in a Connecticut town, all of them involving humans along with animals in some capacity.
Really different and well written.
Entertaining!


Thank you to NetGalley and Grove Atlantic for the gifted ARC in exchange for an honest review.

[Bonnie Brody · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's not often that I read a book so brilliant that it knocks my socks off. Lauren Acampora has accomplished this in a book that defies genres. It is a collection of interwoven short stories, each a living organism in its own right but clearly connected to the other stories included in the collection. Each story can be read and appreciated on its own, but, like Russian stacking dolls, they are not complete without the others, each related to the one it fits inside of or contains.

Animals are at the heart of this book - how we nurture them, how they fit into our lives, how they manifest themselves in the core of our being, and how they help us to preserve, or steal our sanity. They are tender and fierce, at once friends and foes. While we may think they are tamed, they are at one with their place in nature, sometimes at odds with human desires.

It is impossible to choose my favorite story. Each is wonderful in its own right. The connections are sometimes subtle, at other times obvious, but they are clearly apparent. Interestingly, there is no observable hierarchy or order to the stories, but they are linked together in fascinating ways.

They all appear to take place in an upper middle class suburban haven in Connecticut. They take place in homes, senior living facilities, schools, and even personal zoos. The protagonists vary socioeconomically, educationally, and by age and gender. All are seeking personal peace and well-being in their own way, many outside the cultural norms. What fascinated me was the cringy aspect of many of the characters. They were fighting wars that were outer manifestations of inner turmoil.

The stories are populated by varied characters. There is a teenager who thinks she is becoming a bird and the stories delve not only into her mental instability, but into the lives of her caregivers and family. Mental illness and struggles for survival are prevalent but judgment is reserved. I loved that the stories were intergenerational and that the ages and cultural milieus of characters differed widely. Many characters are searching for love while they're also dealing with the pain of misunderstandings and loss.

I can't say enough about this book. I have read other books of linked stories and have especially enjoyed those of Julia Phillips, Elizabeth Strout, Shannon Bowring, and Tommy Orange. If you love literary fiction and enjoy books that have components of trompe l'oeil, magical realism, and surrealism, then this book is for you. Actually, I think it has something for everyone and I give it my highest recommendation.

Thank you to NetGalley and Grove Atlantic for providing me with an early review copy of this book. It is scheduled for publication in June 2026.

[Marcus (Lit_Laugh_Luv)]

interconnected stories about our relationship to the natural world? a beautiful cover? oh you best believe this is hitting that most anticipated shelf

[Tessa Rice · Rating 1 out of 5]

Okay. That was what it was for me, just okay. I am not sure what I initially expected. I have never read anything by this author before, so perhaps I was drawn to it because I'm an animal lover and the title alone. I do appreciate the format of several short stories that are wound together, however by the end I couldn't decide if the author hates animals and animal lovers or not. Most of the characters that are considered animal lovers are shown as insufferable, eccentric, know-it-all's with deeply flawed and obsessive personalities. I don't think I was expecting a feel good Hallmark story, but I found following some of the short stories very annoying and with little closure. I did finish it, but I would not read it again.

[Tim Murphy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have loved Acampora's previous work, which is always juicy and slyly funny and beautifully written, but I truly believe she has written an unputdownable masterpiece with this collection of contemporary stories about the residents (and incoming workers) of a wealthy town on the Long Island Sound named Old Cranbury—and the myriad unnerving, mysterious, brutal, tender and also downright darkly, scabrously funny ways they interact with the various animals in their midst, whether domesticated or wild. This is Our Town meets Winesburg, Ohio meets John Cheever meets Flannery O'Connor meets White Lotus meets Lauren's personal brand of twisted, tender brilliance—meets LOTS of animals of all sorts, some of which you would not expect to find in a tony NYC suburb. The linkages that accrue in these stories bring it nearly to the level of a novel. Lauren's gimlet eye for all her characters (especially the very privileged ones) is so drily devastating yet also never without empathy, or at least understanding why they are the way they are. A deep level of semi-comic dread suffuses every story, and sometimes bad or good people who do bad things do or do not get their comeuppance. I think burnt-out, anxious, exhausted suburban mothers will particularly relate to many of these stories. There are moments of shocking brutality and also of transcendent mercy. It's the best thing I've read in ages and if you have ANY bandwidth left at all to read actual literature, I strongly suggest you make this your one summer book. It's so profoundly satisfying from beginning to end, and the sheer power and beauty of Lauren's writerly gifts are on display here like never before.

[Rezzi Belle Beanz · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a seriously impressive collection of stories. If there is one thing I love in an anthology, it’s when the characters and events are connected in each one. Acampora accomplished this beautifully. They explored so many different motivations for what is behind the actions that people take every day and how they can affect others’ lives. Every story is depicting fully fleshed out characters and they are all woven together so intricately.

Every character had their own wildly unique voice and experience and I was surprised every time someone from a previous story was mentioned in a following story. I think the name “The Animal Room” is fitting, as animals and animal rights and how people feel about animals are at the core of every story. I love that there are still some mysteries, none that are necessarily frustrating to wonder about though, I felt like the last few stories tied up nicely enough that it was a satisfying ending.

Acampora writes in an intelligent way, using big words and an expansive vocabulary without coming across as pretentious, which is something I genuinely appreciate. I hate when an author comes across as thinking they are better than everyone else. Once I got into the swing of their writing style, I felt comfortable and natural to me. I love when I learn and grow my vocabulary through an author’s writing.

It isn’t often I feel the need to own a physical copy of a book but I desperately want a physical copy eventually so I can annotate in it and more easily go back and study how all the stories tie together.
Thank you NetGalley so much for allowing me to have access to an e-ARC copy of this book.

[Jared Kolok · Rating 3 out of 5]

The interconnected nature of these stories was at first a unique and exciting part of this book but by the last few stories I was left unimpressed. Often, I found myself forgetting specific names, relationships between the characters, and how they weaved into the broader narrative. More critically, I found the device tiresome, almost contrived in a way that I felt pulled me from the reading, from the individual story at hand focusing my attention on the dynamics of this small Connecticut town.

Indeed, such sharp focus on the human lives, even as animals rested at the heart of each story and the work as a whole, detracted and forced animals into a backseat as the dramas of these individual lives unfolded to their heart-racing, terrifying, sometimes unsatisfying conclusions. But, among the local politics, elitism, fear, the effort of raising families and communities in the 21st century, broad narratives of gender roles, racism, diversity and inclusion Acampora points to the horrors, complexities, and uncertainties of human life, of living so close to other non-human life with its own agency that is too often callously and indiscriminately taken away.

I think I will continue to digest this book. I look forward to recommending it to customers, there is much to take from it; individually and holistically. I'm not sure I really liked it, but I think that's kind of the point.

[Constance · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was glad to see Acampora return to what she does so masterfully well: linked stories like she did in The Wonder Garden. Magic.

[Daniela · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5 rounded down to 2.

In this collection, stories are set in not only in the same universe but in the same small town. The main character in one is just a name mentioned in another, or an acquaintance, a neighbor, an antagonist even. That was fun, trying to map the connections, but the stories themselves didn't do much for me.

I didn't have any favorites, but a few did spark moments of reflection. There's the obvious central theme of animals, but more than that there are indirect messages about morality, class inequality, politics, mental health.

I found Quarry quite interesting. I saw it as a satire of the wealthy and privileged who find themselves amazed by poverty. Was that the intention? I'm not sure. I also liked that it was written differently than the rest, with no actual dialogue.

The endings were inconclusive, and weakened the build-up of the stories in my opinion. The narration tended to turn to describing concrete actions or to drift away to an imaginary future.

Something that rubbed me the wrong way was how it talks about foreign people and other countries. Might be just my perception as a non-American.

Thanks, NetGalley, for the ARC.

[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good stuff!! I liked how all the stories were connected and that we got to enjoy several points of view of the same happening. We meet some annoying kids, some ignorant rich white couples, some dumb men and some sweet and inspiring characters who will steal your heart. I enjoyed this a lot! Thank you to Grove Atlantic and Netgalley for providing me with an ARC 🫶

[Daria · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5

I found The Animal Room to be beautifully written. The author's style is vivid, and she is attentive (maybe too much) to the details. Thanks to this, I can easily see why the book's rating is so high.

However, the stories themselves weren’t completely to my taste, and I didn’t manage to finish the book. It had this creepy yet emotional vibe that reminded me of Black Mirror. I am not a fan, but I see that there is a huge audience for it.
The second short story was my favorite. I can't fully catch why exactly, but for me it was less obscure - and maybe that's the only reason I need.

Overall, the book left a strong impression, especially due to the writing style - I would try other books by Lauren, even if the themes didn’t fully resonate with me.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC — I appreciated the opportunity.

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

My starred review for this story cycle, which should be included among the best books of the year, was published by Library Journal in May 2026:

Acampora (The Hundred Waters) returns to the affluent Connecticut suburb of her debut story collection, The Wonder Garden, with 13 equally riveting, linked stories about the residents of Old Cranbury and their relationship with animals. In “Dominion,” a former oil company CEO seeks redemption by showing off the zoo on his property to his granddaughter’s kindergarten class, with calamitous results; in “Sentinel,” Dr. Bannister’s patient believes she’s becoming a bird; Adam in “Salvage” seeks spiritual meaning in the roadkill he is removing. These stories are best read in sequence, with characters recurring and readers’ sympathies deepened as they glimpse them from shifting perspectives. In the opener, “Harvest,” a pregnant mother’s concern for her children’s safety devolves into paranoia when her neighbor refuses to stop bowhunting on his property. That neighbor features later in “Pack,” as retired cop Daryl tries to find his way in a world that has left him behind through his attack dog, Ajax. Acampora’s generously written characters try to navigate the rich, tenuous tapestry of modern life with a fractured understanding of one another.
VERDICT With her two Old Cranbury collections, Acampora imagines a small town and its memorably conflicted inhabitants as indelibly as Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge stories and as intricately woven as Jennifer Egan’s Goon Squad cycle.

Copyright ©2026 Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. Reprinted with permission.

[Demetri Papadimitropoulos · Rating 4 out of 5]

There’s a moment late in “The Animal Room” when a familiar American sound cracks the air at a summer music festival and the world instantly changes shape. It is, strictly speaking, not even a gunshot – it’s a homemade rocket that merely mimics one – but in the age of mass shootings, the distinction barely matters. Panic moves faster than information. A retired police officer, Daryl Metzger, releases his newly certified German Shepherd, Ajax, into the crowd, and the dog does what he has been trained to do: he finds the nearest version of danger and clamps down.

Lauren Acampora’s linked-story collection is built around that kind of hinge – the moment when a private obsession becomes a public event, when a safety ritual becomes an accelerant, when “being prepared” turns into permission. Set in the suburban Connecticut town of Old Cranbury, the book watches its characters the way a naturalist watches a terrarium: with bright attention to motion, scent, enclosure and instinct. In these stories, animals aren’t mere symbols. They are forces that draw out human impulses – and, in a culture already on edge, amplify them.

Old Cranbury is a place of manicured lawns and civic earnestness, but its atmosphere is restless. A memory-care facility rebrands itself into a “vivarium,” importing animals and greenhouse light as if dementia could be soothed by a curated ecosystem. A pregnant newcomer from Brooklyn, Leigh Duvall, is so alert to threat that fox screams, ticks and neighboring bowhunters feel like personal harassment. On the other side of a fence line, Daryl – ex-police, ex-husband, ex-empire of authority – tries to rebuild a sense of purpose by turning a rescue dog into a weapon he can love.

Acampora writes with a contemporary exactness that never feels like mere compression. She likes the tactile particulars that reveal a worldview: the cheap polyester that traps sweat, the clatter stick that makes “rattlesnake sounds” during bite training, the chain-link fence that promises order but mostly advertises vulnerability. Fear is not abstract in this book; it arrives as a plug in the chest, a queasy tug in the gut, a body that registers what the mind won’t yet admit.

“Pack,” the section centered on Daryl and Ajax, is the collection’s most propulsive narrative and its sharpest satire of our safety culture. Daryl discovers Ajax through dumb luck – a surrendered, “too energetic” German Shepherd with one brown eye and one blue that hits him “like a Taser.” He is the rare man who can’t quite stop himself from narrating his own life as a training manual. Through classical and operant conditioning, he believes, any animal with drive can be turned into a “heat-seeking device,” and he speaks that belief with the fervor of a convert.

Daryl’s worldview could have been rendered as a caricature: the aggrieved ex-cop, the online “wolves and betas” rhetoric, the nostalgia for a country he insists has been stolen by “sanctimonious shitbirds.” But Acampora gives him something more interesting than sympathy: internal coherence. His beliefs are not a costume. They are a survival strategy for a man diagnosed with atrial fibrillation, carrying PTSD, grieving a dead partner dog, and watching his authority drain away into policy debates and neighborly glances that no longer automatically defer.

The Aether Festival sequence is a master class in letting the contemporary seep in without turning the fiction into a lecture. The festival’s theme is “Nurturing Nature: Fighting Habitat Loss for Justice, Peace, and the Future of Our Planet.” There are reusable bottles and a water refilling station; there is a sculpture of a spotted lanternfly described as a “guest species,” complete with an elementary-school placard that frames it as a lesson in inclusivity. There is also a poster for sale of teen pop star Avis Envy cuddling a rabbit, a kind of commodified innocence that the town wants to believe in. Daryl reads all of it as sanctimony, and he is the sort of man for whom sanctimony feels like an accusation.

Daryl’s job is gatekeeping in the most literal sense. He and Ajax stand at the entrance, alone in full sun, scanning waves of costumed teens and families. He notices the children first, because children always notice the dog. There is a brief, startling moment of possible human thaw when Leigh – the neighbor who has judged him, feared him, fought him – shows up with her daughters. Daryl waves. For a split second, Leigh’s face softens, and the girls wave back with “trust and goodness and hope.” It is one of the collection’s most painful gestures, because it suggests a version of this story that could have gone differently.

When the sound like a gunshot hits, Acampora captures the blankness of crisis with eerie accuracy. Daryl’s mind goes “clean as the inside of a bell.” In that blankness, training replaces thought. He runs. He releases Ajax against protocol. In the woods, under a bizarre installation of fake owls with glowing bulbs for eyes, the dog pins a bleeding teenager named Jordan – a boy with acne, an insulin pump, and a pocketful of letters to the singer. Jordan’s weapon is not a gun but the fantasy that attention might fix him.

The most haunting detail is the simplest: Ajax won’t release. It is his first real bite; blood has meaning now. Daryl tries commands, then an e-collar, then panics into a choice that is less choice than revelation. He can’t shoot his own dog. The gun sinks under gravity. He fires into empty space and screams for the release anyway. The dog finally lets go, and Daryl reads pride in the blue eye, warmth in the brown – a creature both loyal and newly awakened to its own power. In this moment, Acampora turns the familiar question of accountability on its head. If an animal behaves according to its training, where does blame live?

If “Pack” is the book’s adrenaline, Leigh’s stories provide its slow-burn terror. In the opening section, she arrives from the city pregnant, already primed for catastrophe, and discovers that “nature” is not pastoral but loud, violent, and indifferent. Bowhunting near her property line, a neighbor’s deer carcass display, the sudden intimacy of ticks – the world feels porous. Leigh’s response is both recognizably contemporary and grimly old-fashioned: research the law, make a plan, buy a gun. Acampora is careful to show how quickly a reasonable desire for safety can slide into something that resembles hunger.

In “Vivarium,” a worker at Meadow’s Rest watches management import animals and greenhouse aesthetics into memory care, turning residents into participants in an experiment they can’t fully understand. The story is careful about blame. The staff members are stretched thin; a single spilled insulin vial can become a catastrophe. Administrative language – “enrichment,” “intergenerational enhancement,” “models” – becomes a way to sand down moral friction. Yet the book never allows the reader to stay comfortably cynical. Even an ill-conceived program contains genuine longing: a desire to brighten someone’s day, to make a person feel less alone, to keep a fading mind tethered to something living.

In “Husbandry,” the animal world is not a metaphor for freedom but a structure of obligation. A technician in a research facility watches mice endure protocols that are, on paper, ethically justified. The difference between an air puff and a foot shock becomes a moral weather report. Acampora understands that most ethical lives are made of compromises we rationalize because the alternative is to admit we can’t bear the world’s suffering without outsourcing some of it. Naming a mouse is a small rebellion; it is also an admission of intimacy.

All of this feeds into the book’s quietest, and perhaps most telling, late scene: “Correction,” in which Leigh and Daryl stand in a backyard on a brutally hot August afternoon while their two dogs – German and Australian shepherd – circle and sniff each other, descendants of canis lupus. The humans talk about fences, wildfires and smoke, old age and loss. Leigh needles Daryl about “alpha” talk; he offers a miniature lecture about dog social dynamics. A yelp, a pause, a return to play. “That, right there, was a correction,” he says, meaning: a boundary set without malice.

In Old Cranbury, everyone wants correction: of children’s behavior, of neighbors’ politics, of nature’s mess, of institutions’ failures. But the book suggests that human correction has become distorted by grievance and spectacle. We correct each other through posts, policies, purchases, and performative virtue. We build fences and call them care. We buy guns and call them protection. We outsource our vigilance to dogs, cameras, algorithms, and then act shocked when the tools behave like tools.

What makes “The Animal Room” feel relevant now is not a grab bag of references but a shared atmosphere: over-information, under-trust, and the constant temptation to turn fear into identity. Daryl doom-scrolls into forums that confirm his resentment; Leigh searches laws and statistics until the world looks like an incoming attack. Institutions, from festivals to nursing homes, respond to risk with optics as often as with actual mitigation. And hovering behind everything is the contemporary American fact that we have trained ourselves – culturally, politically, emotionally – to interpret ambiguity as threat.

One of the pleasures of the collection is the way it stages the same national argument in different keys. Leigh and Daryl both crave control, but they pursue it through different liturgies. Leigh’s is the secular sermon of the educated striver: research, boundaries, “good parenting,” intentions that behave like talismans. Daryl’s is the older sacrament of force: training, weapons, hierarchy, the confidence that the world can be corrected if the right people are in charge. Acampora is too shrewd to treat either posture as pure. She shows how each can harden into self-righteousness, and how each can also be a desperate attempt to stay upright in a reality that keeps lurching.

Acampora is especially deft with the way “nature” becomes an alibi for human aggression. Daryl talks about wolves and betas as if biology were destiny; Leigh invokes “mama bear” instinct as if it were a permission slip. Meanwhile actual nature arrives as nuisance and omen: mosquitoes, lanternflies, ticks; foxes screaming in the night; the orange sun and hazy sky of wildfire season. The book understands that climate anxiety rarely looks like a policy debate in daily life. It looks like smoke on a child’s shirt, like a sky that feels wrong, like a season that no longer behaves.

The stories also keep returning to care – not as a warm abstraction but as a material crisis. In Meadow’s Rest, care is an economy: staffing ratios, medication schedules, a single worker choosing between a resident and her own child’s medical emergency. The book’s attention to insulin, to the logistics of keeping a body alive, lands with particular force. So does its attention to old age. Daryl’s father lasts ninety-eight years; his dog makes it to twelve. The arithmetic of grief is blunt, and the burdens of caretaking fall where they always do: on the people with the least margin.

Acampora’s sentences often turn on a small, precise pivot, the way a dog shifts from play to attention. She is fond of lists that feel like inventories of threat – “man, car, fire” – and of images that make the suburban landscape briefly uncanny. A “basketball sun,” a deer head “gift,” a bowl of water where saliva mingles: these are ordinary details rendered with the pressure of omen.

For all its menace, “The Animal Room” has an underrun of mordant humor. Acampora knows how people talk when they’re trying to sound reasonable while panicking: the chirpy wellness language of administrators, the stiff politeness of neighbors, the righteous cadence of online tirades. The comedy isn’t a release valve so much as another form of dread. You can hear, in these voices, a society that has forgotten how to disagree without turning disagreement into threat.

A lesser writer might have turned this book into a morality play with easy villains: the reactionary cop, the overanxious mother, the cynical administrator, the deranged teen. Acampora refuses that comfort. She is willing to make Daryl appalling and still recognizably human; willing to show Leigh’s fear as both rational and contagious; willing to make even Jordan’s obsessive romance feel, in its structure, like a distorted version of longing the culture sells to everyone. The book’s moral imagination is capacious enough to hold multiple kinds of terror at once – and to show how they feed each other.

If there is a flaw, it is the one that sometimes attends ambitious linked collections: the motifs can begin to show their seams. Snakes, wolves, enclosures, fire, the language of packs and predators – these echoes are often thrilling, but occasionally the reader can sense the author tightening the web. Yet even this feels thematically apt. These stories are about pattern-seeking, about the human tendency to connect dots until the world looks like a conspiracy or a lesson. The book is sharp enough to implicate that tendency even as it harnesses it.

In the lineage of recent American fiction that anatomizes suburban dread and civic fracture – “Leave the World Behind,” “The Push,” even the eco-satirical paranoia of “Birnam Wood” – Acampora’s distinctive move is to keep returning to the animal as a measure of honesty. Dogs self-handicap, submit, correct, bite, release. Their clarity makes human confusion look like negligence. And yet the book never suggests we can become animals to save ourselves. It suggests something more unsettling: that we already are, and that the question is what we choose to train.

By the time the last page closes, what lingers is not simply a plot point but a sensation – the feeling of standing at a fence line, listening to the woods, trying to decide whether the sound you heard is danger or imagination. “The Animal Room” is the rare contemporary book that does not mistake relevance for commentary. It offers something harder and more lasting: recognition. As a work of linked fiction, it earns an 88 out of 100 – not because it flatters its readers, but because it watches them closely enough to make the watching feel like a kind of correction.

[switterbug (Betsey) · Rating 5 out of 5]

[5+]

Suburban life in America’s bedroom communities—the cottage clusters in Connecticut—have never been more anthropologically explored and exposed as in Acampora’s new novelistic interlinked short stories. Mad, brilliant, a towering festival of fiery and periodically disturbing behaviors. Animal and human life intricately braided in some tales, perilously disconnected at others. Are humans lone wolves or pack animals? We can be both. And we can transcend. For example, in “Sentinel,” a young woman chirps like a bird and folds her arms into wings.

In these stand-alone (they could be) stories, characters pop in and out of the separate but electrically joined narratives. I don’t feel like I’m reading short stories, which I often stay away from, as the format tends to be too bare bones for me. But in The Animal Room, each story resembles a novel, crammed delicately with secondary and tertiary characters, not just the cellular antagonist/protagonist.

Class clashes; hierarchies; predators; mental illness; extremism; ecosystems; family; marriage; love; hate; friends; enemies; race relations;---the list of topics, tropes, and themes are endless. Stories are charged and command your attention—they will engage you, perhaps enrage you, and sometimes blow you out of your seat. One of my favorites involves an art gallery that claims to treasure animals—using them for art only when they die a natural death or lose parts (like feathers). The conflicting ideologies and outcome rubs up against scorched earth.

Despite the diverse personalities and plots, there’s a sense of concision with each story. I don’t know how she does it, but Acampora governs the individual-but-linked narratives with a lucid focus. The author’s precise prose is never precious or pretentious. It may be in your face, but never too on the nose.

Lyrical and limbered and loaded, the pages are packed with consequential revelations. In "Vivarium," a former oil company CEO buys a ranch full of exotic animals in early retirement. He wants to believe his work is charitable, but his motivations and actions are flawed. In trying to share them with the world, he makes some blistering mistakes.

Other intriguing inclusions—a first impression (for the reader and one of the characters) of a deer hunter evolves over time. In “Tank,” a mother buys a fish for her young and difficult, hostile son. The prose, as always, is meaty and animal, so clean, while the cast is messy AF. The third person POV is almost endangered in these contemporary times. Acampora nails it, each page produces a bolt of lightning, the kind that changes my brain chemistry for all time.

“The illustration...showed the cerebral cortex, the brain’s corporate suite, cooling giving orders. Beneath that, the mysterious renegade caverns of the limbic system, passed down from our mammalian ancestors. The frontal lobe issues commands that were vetoed by occupants of this primeval animal room. The hippocampus, a curled seahorse. The beetle-sized amygdala. The snaking cingulate gyrus. All of these clutched brute memories, glued emotions to them, and refused to march toward danger.”

A monumental thank you to Grove Press for sending me a gorgeous ARC for review. The cover illustration is beautiful. I will eventually read everything that Acampora has published.

[Wolfie · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.75 stars rounded up to 4!

This was such an intense and reflective reading experience! More than anything, I found myself intrigued by the way the stories gradually intertwined and came together. The collection explores the complicated relationships we have with nature and with one another, revealing how easily people can misunderstand, misjudge and remain unknowable to one another. While not every story worked for me equally, the ones that did left a lasting impression.

What worked for me:
I loved how interconnected the stories were! As the collection progressed, seemingly separate characters and events began to overlap in ways I would have never expected yet made total sense. Often, these moments showed how limited our perspectives can be and just how easily people can misunderstand each other’s intentions.

For me, one of the strongest and most meaningful aspects of the collection was its exploration of humanity’s relationship with animals. Whether approaching that relationship through a lens of care, pity, exploitation or companionship, the fact that there was always an animal at the center of each story gave the collection a strong thematic backbone and tied the narratives together beautifully. "Sentinel" and "Salvage" were particular standouts for me, as I felt a strong personal connection to the way they explored these themes.

Finally, the writing itself was really well-done. Even when a particular story didn’t connect with me, I still appreciated the quality of the prose and the vivid emotional depth brought to the story. Many of the characters inspired both empathy and almost revulsion simultaneously, which made them feel even more real, complicated, and very human.

What didn’t work for me:
The first two stories didn't fully grab me, as well as a couple other stories throughout that simply didn't hold my interest or I found it hard to connect with. However, that will often be the case with short story collections, and I was glad to find that a majority of the stories did resonate with me!

While I appreciated the interconnected structure, it occasionally became difficult to remember characters and names from stories that had appeared much earlier in the book. As more connections emerged, I sometimes found myself struggling to place certain references and would have to go back to double-check things.

I would recommend this book to: those who enjoy character-driven fiction, vivid prose, and thoughtful explorations of humanity’s relationship with nature and animals.

Content Warnings: animal cruelty, animal death, mild injury, pregnancy

Many thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for an ARC of this book!

[Mary Lins · Rating 5 out of 5]

“The Animal Room” by Lauren Acampora, consists of thirteen thought-provoking interconnected stories skillfully written with an unflinching and unsentimental view of American life and culture.
Acampora achieves this through the fascinating and varied characters of a small Connecticut town, and the animal world that surrounds them.

Daryl must have dominion over the animals he owns, and we eventually find out why.

Jeanne is an animal hoarder.

Wealthy ex-CEO Roy Fox has accumulated a wide variety of wild animals including some rescued big cats which he houses on his large estate. He’d like to share his love of wild animals with his granddaughter’s kindergarten class. What could go wrong?

Deanna works in a senior citizen care facility where animal therapy is being introduced. Here Acampora illustrates the juxtaposition, and often the clash, of wealthy “American hero’s” of the “Greatest Generation” being taken care of by hard working immigrants striving for the very American ideals that generation fought for.

Lesbian Animal rights advocates Lanny and Haven have been working to protect animals for decades. Will the resort to violence to further their cause?

A wealthy couple goes on an African Safari which includes a tour of the slums of Cape Town where the poor are on exhibit like animals.

Jeanne’s sister Allison’s six-year-olds son, Chance, is disruptive at best, violent at worst; wild animal-like. Allison becomes obsessed by the Betta fish she bought to soothe him.

Roy’s estranged daughter Shannon has adopted a six-year-old from South Africa who loves a particular insect that the community has decreed an invasive species and is intent on its eradication.

We learn about Zoanthropy! A rare mental health condition.

Acampora has an admirable gift for insightful character development within the short story form.
As the various connections among the characters are revealed we begin to see them interacting with each other and note how often they misunderstand and misinterpret each other.

Acampora masterly reveals that our relationships with the animal world, and often with each other, are complicated, layered, and often fraught. Through the close examination of each character, we confront the lies we tell ourselves; recognizing the small and large justifications for our bad actions, especially when they have negative consequences for others.

Many thanks to Grove Press for an ARC of these compelling stories.

[Jill · Rating 5 out of 5]

OMG! As a voracious reader…as a passionate animal-lover…as an empathic human…I am damn near speechless after savoring this extraordinary book. I cannot find the words to capture my reading experience. All I can say is if you read one book this year, make sure this is the one! It is spellbinding!

The Animal Room is, at its heart, a book about how we relate and connect with our animal selves, our families, our communities, and the equally essential other species that inhabit the planet we share. Each story could easily stand by herself but progressively, the reader encounters familiar beings with each successive story. And through this process, the reader gains a fuller understanding about who the characters are and why they reacted in the manner they did earlier on.

Gradually, the characters’ outward masquerades are peeled away, sometimes harshly, sometimes gently, until they are vulnerable and denuded and left for us to peer at without their preening and defenses. We encounter a macho deer hunter who mentally terrorizes his pregnant next door neighbor …an affluent couple who return from an African safari without a clue that their privilege has made them see African through a distorted lens…an out-of-control and animalistic six-year-old named Chance whose mother becomes obsessed with the rare scarlet Betta fish he adopts…a delicate and fragile college girl who appears to be turning into a bird and is on the way to being misdiagnosed by her traditional psychiatrist. It’s hard to decide which is most compelling.

At the core of every story is an animal – a dog, an owl, an ancient fish, a bird, a rat, a deer. Human characters imperfectly try to hoard them, tame them, train them, rescue them, save them, study them, even in one case, become them. But the one thing they can’t seem to do is understand them – even though our human brain is descended from animals over hundreds of millions of years. Even the so-called lowly rat shares 65% of our DNA.

What happens when we begin to get close to that thin line that separates the human animal from the rest of the animal kingdom? When we don’t listen to it or respect it or honor it? When we forget what it means to be human? I owe a deep thanks to Grove Atlantic and NetGalley for enabling me to be an early reader in exchange for an honest review. But most of all, I thank the author, Lauren Acampora, for writing such an extraordinary book that reminds me all over again that THIS is why I read!

[jenny · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Animal Room by Lauren Acampora is a thought-provoking short story collection that explores the complex and intertwined lives of humans and animals. One of the book’s greatest strengths is how each story looks at a different aspect of the human–animal relationship. Whether it’s the ethics of hunting, the meaning and responsibility of owning a pet, or the ways in which we define ourselves through animals, Acampora avoids giving easy or predetermined answers. Instead, she creates space for reflection, encouraging readers to question their own behavior and reconsider their attitudes toward the nonhuman world.

At the same time, the collection does not limit itself to human–animal connections. It also delves deeply into the complexity of human-to-human relationships. The stories are subtly interconnected through recurring characters, often presenting different sides of the same conflict. This narrative technique creates a broader emotional landscape and fosters empathy, allowing readers to understand multiple perspectives within a single moral dilemma. As a result, relationships—whether between humans and animals or among humans themselves—are portrayed as layered, fragile, and deeply influenced by personal history and belief.

Another aspect for which Acampora deserves praise is her ability to craft morally ambiguous characters. Many of the people in these stories hold opinions or make choices I personally struggled to agree with. Yet their motivations always felt believable. Rather than drawing clear lines between right and wrong, Acampora shows how complicated moral questions can be. The stories are provocative, but never preachy; they invite reflection instead of delivering a lesson.

Reading this collection was an intense and reflective experience. It took me quite a while to finish; not because it was difficult to read, but because I often needed time after each story to sit with my thoughts. The themes stayed with me, and I found myself reconsidering my own assumptions more than once.

Ultimately, The Animal Room encourages us to think more carefully about the relationships we inevitably have with animals. Simply withdrawing from them isn’t realistic, nor is it necessarily the answer. Instead, this collection reminded me again that we all have to become more aware of the shared environment we live in and aim for a more ethical coexistence.

Thanks to NetGalley and Grove Atlantic for my ARC!

[Betsy Robinson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lauren Acampora writes like a controlled literary volcano erupting in slow motion. The word I'd most like to use for the energy of her prose in this anthology of connected short stories is Shakti, but I'm afraid most people won't understand it.

There is the pure fire of life and creation in these stories. Sometimes it kindles for a while so you feel heat long before the burst of raging fire.

I'm not going to break down the 13 stories. Each has its own life and purpose, but together they build a world (or specifically a town) of people with all the flaws of humanity. There were stories that took my breath away. Early on, the one titled "Shelter" demanded its own review and subsequent essay which I published on Substack. There are stories of enemies that let the reader grow to see everybody in multiple dimensions. There were stories of extremism and pain and rigidity and transformation. And the final two stories pulled everything together with a breathtaking crescendo melting into the perfect resolving coda.

Lauren Acampora wrote a symphony.

All of the writing is exquisite—again, as I said, controlled despite its fury and heat. The characters and plots are so diverse even though they all involve animals that I wondered how Acampora accumulated the knowledge to create this collection. It feels like a lifetime of work, although nothing about it feels researched to death or labored.

In a video, Acampora did with her husband, artist Thomas Doyle, who did the cover for her previous collection of short stories The Wonder Garden, she says that the two of them are like suburbs anthropologists, which is a perfect way to explain the new book—it's a product of study so deep that it becomes part of the writer to emerge in a new and unique way. And since she, as the writer, is looking out so intently and reporting what she sees, I found myself uncustomarily curious about her: what are the experiences that make her conversant in psychology, science, zoology and relationships of all sorts? I'm sure the answers are in the material because no matter how far out a writer gazes, ultimately we all write ourselves. Lauren Acampora displays a soul of endless colors in this wonderful collection.

[Stephanie · Rating 5 out of 5]

So incredibly well written. Gripping, captivating short stories that left me hungry for more, filled with unique and interesting concepts that left me deep in thought.

For the stories being so short they were intense and engrossing, with little tie-ins and callbacks to previous characters and scenarios from other chapters making them that much more compelling. I was immediately emotionally invested and captivated by the different storylines, each one better than the last, and was shocked with my jaw on the floor every time one of them ended. This book provides an unusual look at the minds behind people surrounded by animals, and how that can impact and affect their everyday life. There are so many roles we humans can play in the animal world. PETA activists, highway patrolmen in charge of cleaning roadkill, animal rescuers, hunters. I found it fascinating to see animals from their points of view, and how it essentially takes part in shaping them into the person they are. Each short story had a crazy ending that had me gasping aloud and wanting more, but the connections and callbacks in the later chapters were well worth the wait.

Many of the characters become so worried, consumed and obsessed and were spiraling out of control by the end of their part in the novel. I love a book that flips the usual narrative on its head and makes you feel a lack of empathy towards the characters because of their catastrophizing or poor choices, even if only for a moment. There was just enough character growth, and a lot of their internal conflicts felt so extremely relatable. Although the ending was sweet and fantastic and wrapped up the book perfectly in a neat bow, and felt very full-circle.

Can’t stress enough how much I appreciated the diverse vocabulary used throughout. I genuinely enjoyed highlighting words as I read and finally getting to make good use of my dictionary tool on my kindle. Who doesn’t love a challenge? I feel like that’s been a rare find for me lately.

This book was wonderful, powerful and provocative and I can’t recommend it enough. Laura Acampora’s writing is superb.

Thanks so so much to the author and to Morgan Entrekin of Grove Atlantic, and to NetGalley for the ARC.

5 ⭐️

[kellylikestoread · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5 stars, even though I DNF'd it at 40%, and here's why.

I'm a vegetarian and have been 20 years now. I'm an animal rights activist and love animals more than people. I've heard all sorts of propaganda (thanks to PETA being part of the reason I initially became a vegetarian) and, to me, this feels like a load of propaganda. I think it's due mostly to who I am and the life I've lived up to this point. If I hadn't been semi-indoctrinated by PETA at 13 years old (yes, I recognize the harm they do now, and have since a year or two later) then maybe these stories wouldn't feel this way. But as it stands, these stories feel like a mix of pro-PETA and pro-animal-but-extreme-without-being-PETA. Again, I think this is due to my semi-unique experiences and I don't think these stories would come across this way to most readers.

THAT ALL BEING SAID! I do believe these stories were very well written. The characters felt fleshed out, the writing itself was very nice, the storylines made sense, and everything felt cohesive. It's unfortunate that I got propaganda vibes, but I may try to look into Acampora's other writing to give her a chance as I did like the bones, just not the meat (pun sorta intended lol)

Overall, give it a read. Don't let my DNF spoil you if you're interested in this sort of thing.

[liz ⚰️ · Rating 3 out of 5]

***3.5 stars***
ARC provided by netgalley!

conceptually and thematically, i really appreciate this collection of stories. i've always been interested in stories that use animals to reflect human nature and our more basic instincts vs. our social norms. in many ways, this collection succeeds at that comparison, especially in the first few stories which i felt were the most unique and impactful. especially in the last third of this collection, i felt myself losing interest in this concept that felt like it was a little rundown by the time we reach the end.

as the collection grows, as does the cast of characters and their various connections to each other. while i thought this was also very well done for the most part, it got less surprising and charming and more expected and sometimes forced, much like the human vs. animal theme. with all of these stories taking place in the same town, i really wanted the town itself to become a character and a driving force for the plot, but it was ultimately lost in the background which i found to be a wasted opportunity, or just something that would have made this book more to my taste.

the writing itself was excellent, and in the first eight or so stories i found myself highlighting a lot of brilliant moments - i think this just went on a little too long to stay truly intriguing throughout.

[Olivia Mol · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 rounded up! This was a well thought out and well executed short story collection about how we interact with animals.

For me, a short story collection is always more interesting when they're interconnected, like in The Animal Room, where we get the POVs from multiple people who live in the same small town. I thought that this format was successful in getting the main message across and really highlighting how people with similar morals treat animals and wildlife differently, and how we judge other based on their relationships with the natural world.

Pretty much all of the stories in here made me sad, frustrated, angry, etc. I wish that there had been a few more stories with happy endings or hopeful messaging. Overall, this collection left me feeling a bit somber and, for lack of a better term, a lot of these stories bummed me out.

Perhaps that was the point of the collection, but I do think that including some stories where people had more positive relationships to animals and nature would have helped me feel a bit more connected to some of these characters.

Overall, a great story collection, I really liked the writing style, and I'm interested in other titles by this author.

[Nanette Coleman · Rating 5 out of 5]

To begin, this book is actually fabulous! I really enjoyed piecing all the interconnected short stories together. I wouldn’t normally say I enjoy taking notes while reading a book, but I really found it satisfying to connect all the characters on paper.

Every short story had an underlying animal factor, all different and unique to each story with different points of view. There were parts that I really resonated with, I live in lantern fly land, and the overly abundant fear over the invasion was real, which is so comical now. I also deep dove into fish ownership just like Allison, all because of my daughter’s first betta in a flower vase. So many things in this book were so relatable!

Overall, the story telling was great. Some characters were more likable than others, there was a nice balance. I think the ending was a little anticlimactic, I was expecting something more dramatic, but that isn’t always necessary. I am glad that some of the stories came full circle and some of the bigger cliffhanger questions were eventually answered in later stories. Although I was rooting for Noah and Adam to have happy endings!

[Rachel Brown · Rating 4 out of 5]

These thirteen stories take place across several loosely connected lives in a small Connecticut town. Though each story centers in some capacity on animals, it’s the people we’re really looking at. The collection is an excellent demonstration of how slippery human morality can be, painting and pushing boundaries from every angle.

Several stories illustrate this by presenting a character who centers themselves on a logical fulcrum of morality, but then winds themselves so tightly around it that they send themselves hurdling over the handlebars and beyond all reason (for example, a dog rescuer who becomes a dog hoarder). Other stories center on a character who believes themselves to possess excellent moral hygiene but carries out repeated questionable actions and judgements. Some stories show the reader the true interior of a life one would likely judge from the outside.

Most of these characters will elicit both empathy and repugnance from their readers, some more of one than the other. They’ll ask their readers to think, feel, and expand their frames of judgment.

Thank you to Grove Press, Lauren Acampora, and NetGalley for this eARC. All opinions are my own.

[Sookie · Rating 3 out of 5]

When the narrative relies on tool to make the narration enjoyable, I am already distracted. But I do appreciate Acampora to have built an excruciatingly beautiful web of information that's built slowly and steadily with every single page - taking in names, random information, relationships. It all adds up to the interconnected nature of the stories and not just bound by geography.

I have never had animals around me, and even when I did, it was dogs raised by a neighbor that I liked to play with but never responsible for its well being. In The Animal Room Acampora explores modern day societal concerns and the aspect of humanities itself, through animals and our purpose in their lives.

Even without extra instrumentation that's prevalent and at times dampened my reading experience, Acampora's writing is thought provoking, has managed to crop up in my head at rarest of times and has the marking of becoming something larger than a collection of stories.

Thank you to Netgalley and Grove Atlantic for providing me with a free copy of this e-book in exchange for an honest review.

[Cory · Rating 3 out of 5]

Coming June 9, 2026.

The Animal Room is a collection of interconnected stories set in a small Connecticut town, all exploring the complex and often uncomfortable relationships between humans and animals. Lauren Acampora's writing is undeniably strong and I appreciated how the characters and storylines gradually overlapped to create a larger portrait of the community. The collection raises thought-provoking questions about morality, loneliness, obsession, and our treatment of both animals and one another. However, while some stories were compelling and memorable, others felt slow or failed to fully engage me, making the overall reading experience somewhat uneven. The dark tone and frequent depictions of cruelty, violence, and emotional dysfunction may also be difficult for some readers. Although I admired the craftsmanship and interconnected structure, I never felt fully invested in every story, leaving me appreciating the book more than truly loving it.

Thank you to NetGalley and Grove Atlantic for this ARC in exchange for my honest review.

[Allison Kelly · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Animal Room

This collection of short stories by Lauren Acampora started out slow for me. The first two stories I was underwhelmed and thought they were a bit overwritten. But I’m so glad I kept going.

The third story was full of medical references, psychiatric illness and overall was amazing, the details right on. The next story was about a privileged couple who went on a safari story and the underlying social commentary were excellent. Next was a story about a behaviorally challenged boy and his devoted mother and as a special needs mom myself, I can say it was scarily accurate. The last one was about a man who scoops roadkill off the side of the road (yes, gross!) and I loved it. They were interlinked in the best way, it came as a surprise every time. I’m still thinking about them.

I highly recommend this book if you like short stories that surprise you and are creative. Thank you for Grove Atlantic and NetGalley for the eArC.

[Matt Bender · Rating 4 out of 5]

These are deeply intertwined but unique stories. One of the more enjoyable story collections I’ve read.

As far as the animals go, they are more of a motify or device than a theme, but each story has an (often exotic) human-animal connection. The setting is the NY suburbs and the collection opens with a mom who is frustrated by recreational hunters. The stories get stranger. Dominion (which is in this years best American short stories) is an obvious standout—a retired oil executive imports animals for a private zoo and then decides to host an elementary school field trip without recognizing the hazards. Each story branches out and links characters in interesting ways.

A few of the stories take beliefs about animals to the absurd conclusions and others verge into a satire of suburban white people. I found them fresh and funny and didn’t have any epiphanies about animals so much as was struck by how animal like people and culture can often be.