Some of the worlds in these texts span eons, while others exist in a kind of non-time, unlocatable but tethered just enough to our reality that they can be understood.
Griffith’s work is never not out of conversation with what makes our world so strange as to seem supernatural—and what makes the supernatural so familiar, so imaginable, as to seem real.
Johnson's work offers readers the opportunity not just to try to fill certain emotive or experiential gaps in language, but also to reflect on what it means to try to fill the gaps at all.
Significantly, neither the humans nor the tigers are shown to possess an original or authoritative version of the narrative, and it is only in such collaborative and dialogic encounters that human-animal relations and entanglements can be dis-entangled.
Looking back, I see that my initial hope for this episode was that the mud would have a heartbeat and a heart that has teeth and crippling anxiety. Some of that hope has become a reality, but at what cost?
This novel’s perhaps unique, and certainly memorable, contribution to time travel literature is: how to face a past we can endlessly relive, but which finds its way nonetheless into our present?
