Tommy D'Angelo came home to Buffalo to take care of his dying mother. There is just one problem: Camilla has no intention of letting him take care of anything.
A struggling screenwriter with an overactive imagination and a complicated relationship with adulthood, Tommy soon finds himself slipping back into the family patterns he thought he had escaped. His cousin Sal may be involved in something criminal. Old secrets keep surfacing. His father's shadow is everywhere. And Tommy's carefully managed sense of reality is becoming increasingly difficult to trust.
Then he starts waking up sore, filthy, and unable to remember what happened the night before.
As Tommy's rational writer-brain tries to explain the gaps, another part of him is getting louder-a primal, wolfish self driven by instinct, desire, anger, and the unsettling certainty that civilized behaviour may be overrated. Somewhere between family crisis, existential panic, suspicious relatives, corrupt schemes, and conversations no reasonable person should be having with wildlife, Tommy is forced to confront the past he fled and the future waiting for him.
Funny, profane, philosophical, and gloriously strange, I Animal is a darkly comic literary novel about mortality, family, identity, belonging, and the animal underneath the stories we tell ourselves.