Hollow Kingdom by Kira Jane Buxton

I think I found my favorite novel of the year already. Hollow Kingdom by Kira Jane Buxton, released in 2019 Aug is a beautiful, breakneck romp through a zombie apocalypse as seen through the eyes of pet crow named S.T (Shit Turd. Yeah Beat that for originality!) with a confounding identity crisis and an unnatural love for Cheetos.  

Yes, it is as wildly unexpected as it sounds and this sense of zany originality is the soul of the whole implausible story. As grim and terrible as the premise sounds - where the humanity is now extinct, turned into mindless zombies through a virus that spreads through iphone/ipad screens - Kira's assured writing gives us exacting visuals of a world gone crazy but also subtly and cleverly touches upon the subtext that is beneath all this drama. That the world or rather Mother Nature needs balance. About how all the animals or the species need each other in this world. 

So ST, a domesticated crow is living in blissful ignorance with his master Big Jim and their lazy self-indulgent goofball pet dog named Dennis in Seattle when this apocalypse hits the human beings or MoFos [ MoFo - is how his master Big Jim refers in general to all other human beings and this clearly colours his own take on this species] around him. Now mind you, ST is a big MoFo fan.  He thinks the MoFos are a clever, incredibly sophisticated species who have invented his favorite things in life - like football, Cheetos to name a few. However, the day Big Jim is infected and his eyeball drops out, ST suspects something is wrong with this world. And along with the goofy ( and might i say, absolutely adorable) canine counterpart Dennis, ST sets out to explore the rest of the world. Mostly, in a bid to find that one MoFo who could possibly help them out in this crisis, ie a human being who is not infected yet. Because to his crow-brain, it is impossible to fathom that such a powerfully clever species that had taken over Nature itself could capitulate and give up in the face of this apocalypse. 

What follows is a harrowing and dangerous quest that ST and Dennis undertake to get answers and possibly survive this riptide of devastating change. ST meets up and befriends a murder of crows, the College murder (those idiots, as he calls them), whom he has always despised and mocked. But time and again, as the murder comes in to rescue him and Dennis, his impressions slowly change. There are many trysts and deals made with other wild animals and ST realises that murders are formed, not just of crows but a bunch of seemingly unrelated set of animals, all joining hands for survival. This concept of Found Family is a strong undercurrent to the story throughout. Kira toys with the concept of the Chosen One, in ST - a cowardly selfish crow who slowly, understands and appreciates the need for his 'spots' to evolve and change. 

Kira's language is a wonder and the book is ripe with fascinating details, well researched and starkly revealing. She pays tribute to our ( meaning human's) boundless and sometimes irrational fascination with multiple things - like Football, ice-cream, online dating etc and takes an axe to them, as she cleverly makes fun of all these and more through the sardonic, mildly offensive viewpoint of ST, the crow that cannot decide whether he is a MoFo or a crow. This identity crisis is a pivotal part of the narrative as ST uses his MoFo affinities to think cleverly to get out tight spots, when faced with danger. We meet a variety of other animals, who are part of this cast with ST, out to save this world. And how ST slowly begins to realise that even the other animals, like crows, penguins or the primates etc have their own roles to play in this epic scale drama being orchestrated by Mother Nature. 

As a nod to the world around us, Kira gives us these interstitial chapters from the POV of several animals around the world, including a delightful cat named Genghis Cat, the last polar bear and a camel somewhere in the deserts of middle-east. But I wish there was more to some of these colourful personalities.

Hollow Kingdom is funny, poignant and thought-provoking in ways, no other book can be. Using ST's acerbic wit and detached wry observations on the human behaviour as well as the rest of his own natural surroundings, we are taken deeper into the meaning of the balance of nature. Kira Jane Buxton's irreverent take on the extinction of mankind is actually pretty well researched and by taking on the animal's side of the ring, we get an exuberant take on a grim subject like apocalypse, with a lesson or two thrown in somewhere in the middle of a survival drama.