Mammals, I Think We Are Called

I've been waiting for a collection of Giselle Leeb's short stories for a few years, and it's just as wonderful as I'd hoped! With wry dark humour and a boundless and inventive imagination, Leeb makes us look at the familiar with fresh eyes, taking us out of our everyday realities to explore everything that makes us human or non-human. From the weatherman in the opening story onwards, you won't want to put this book down, but you will make yourself because you don't want it to end. Everything that makes a great short story is here.

-- Tania Hershman

It is both thought-provoking and entertaining, perhaps because of the author’s constant focus on building a sense of atmosphere … A collection that manages to balance heavy topics, while also leaving the reader with a sense of hope, Leeb hits a balance … Skillfully ambiguous, dark and also optimistic, Mammals I Think We Are Called is a wonderful contribution to the local literary world.

-- Lizzy O’Riordan * Leftlion *

These stories are startlingly weird, blackly hilarious, raw and dreamlike. The common thread I think is a breathtakingly of-this-moment sense of alienation – from the natural world, from each other, from a sense of what's true and what's deception. But there's always a shred of hope somewhere in among the disaffection and pain, and that's what pulls me through the moments of horror … I was surprised by the range and breadth of these stories, and in particular was amazed at the poise of "The Goldfinch is Fine", in which a weatherman gradually loses his mind over an irrational, then increasingly certain terror of rising seas, “Hooked”, in which collective, hallucinatory dreams reunite an isolated city, and “Barleycorn”, in which a mysterious plague of spontaneous hair growth coincides with a hunt for a serial killer. These are challenging stories that invite the reader to engage in unexpected depth.

-- Michael DeLuca

These eighteen short stories are fantastically imaginative and cover a wide range of themes including identity, psychology, and the environment. There is humour and darkness, joy and sorrow, realism and the Fantastick. There's extreme weather, toy apes coming to life, hauntings, cyborgs, and even cryogenics. Wide-ranging in theme and style, they were a delight.

-- Rupert Da